Best of 2020

In a difficult and unusual year, I considered skipping my annual “Best of,” which always highlights architecture I visited during the year. But here it is in glorious misery—maybe somebody inexplicably looks forward to it.

Gratitude
I was able to remain healthy, and I was able to work from home when needed and work (alone) in my office when possible. I’m privileged.

The Kimbell
I traveled just once in 2020, in February, to the University of Texas-Arlington. I enjoyed meeting with Architectural Engineering students there, and reviewing their work.
I only had a short bit of spare time, and I raced to visit Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum. It’s a building I knew very well; here’s a short talk I made sometime ago for sophomore structural engineering students. It’s an amazing building: present, muscular, calm, and of course brilliantly-detailed. And above all, it’s a wonderful environment for art. Here are some of the usual photos:

In case my interior world is of interest
During the most stressful and isolated periods of the year, I occasionally found myself in a deep, pleasurable reverie. Most commonly, I would be strolling the streets of Siena (with the aroma of wild boar ragu, the irregular footfalls on brick streets), along the Paris canals (bread and butter, motorcycle noise), in Hampstead, London (ale, elm trees), and at Rievaulx Abbey (fog, firewood smoke). Again, I’m privileged.

My Hometown
Do you know the Bruce Springsteen lyric about a boy and his father?

I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick
And steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say ‘Son, take a good look around
This is your hometown.’

My hometown is South Minneapolis; I was raised a few miles from the site where George Floyd was killed in May and where everyone watched the protests and (separately) destructive actions that followed. About my hometown, I said on Twitter at the time: “while it wasn't utopia it was diverse and tolerant. I'm angry and sad tonight.”
I don’t know what the future holds for my hometown. True progress will involve police reform, better jobs, and a different distribution of capital. In particular, it seems to me that the fundamental problem (here and elsewhere) is the disparity between wages and property values. African-Americans in South Minneapolis need to be able to own their homes and small businesses.
You can donate to the Lake Street Council here.

credit: https://flic.kr/p/2jtNS4U

Race and Architecture
The killing of George Floyd and subsequent events certainly sharpened the focus on race, for me and others in the world of architecture. The book Race and Modern Architecture was a best seller; I look forward to getting deeper into it. I reoriented my Architectural History survey class to better address white supremacy. I began with the issue of confederate monuments, and I incorporated new material on, for example, Seneca Village, Mecca Flats, and Henry Wilcots. More improvements to come.

The Year in Architecture
Best new project? I’d say: The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, by Höweler + Yoon Architecture (H+Y) and Mabel O. Wilson. More here. As a bit of instant analysis, it seems to me that Maya Lin’s legacy on monument and landscape design is extraordinary.
What else happened in architecture this year? (Not much?) I don’t think Trump’s executive order is worth fretting about or theorizing. As Aaron Sorkin wrote: They’re trying to get us to swing at a pitch in the dirt.

Rest in Peace
It was shocking and saddening when Michael Sorkin passed away in March. He was both important to the world of architecture and to me personally. Among his many, many important contributions, he described contemporary urbanism, almost thirty years ago, as “Variations on a Theme Park.” I think its worth reflecting on whether that’s still true (yes) and what it means.

Thanks for Visiting
solarhousehistory.com had 19,900 pageviews in 2020. That's about 55 per day.
The most popular blog topics were:
Le Corbusier and the Sun (2,000 pageviews)
Zeilenbau orientation and Heliotropic housing (1,060)
Edison’s Famous Quote (1,020)
Surface Reading (800)
Tools: The Shading Protractor (710)
Nixon’s Energy Policy (700)
Art Nouveau and Modernisme (600)

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Best of 2019
Best of 2018
Best of 2017
Best of 2016
Best of 2015
The Solar House: 2013 Year in Review

AIA Gold Medal: Edward Mazria

A short note to say congratulations to Edward Mazria, winner of the 2021 AIA Gold Medal, announced this week. He’s an important figure in the history of solar architecture, principally for his authorship of The Passive Solar Energy Book (Rodale, 1979). In fact he’s probably the most “green” architect to win the AIA Gold Medal, so maybe this award signals a positive turn in that direction.

As I mentioned in my book The Solar House, there was great demand for information about passive solar heating in the late 1970s, and sales of Mazria’s book totaled about 500,000. This remains a rather astonishing number. Although our knowledge and tools have evolved, the book remains a fundamental resource and a historical record of that important period.

More information, and some images of Mazria’s early passive solar architecture, at Architecture Magazine.

The Thermostat Age

In 2016 I wrote a paper called “The Thermostat Age: Questions of Historiography” for the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) conference. Since it has quite a bit of original thinking, I thought I’d share it.

A quick summary:
• Steven Mouzon coined “The Thermostat Age” in his 2010 book The Original Green.
• This paper is exploratory: to test whether “The Thermostat Age” is a valid and useful concept for architectural history.
• Although architectural historians Reyner Banham, Sigfried Giedion, and James Marston Fitch have paid attention to this subject, we don’t treat the energy-intensive buildings of the 20th century as a coherent category.
• If “The Thermostat Age” is indeed a valid and useful concept, we ought to be able to reconstruct the key technologies, texts, and canonical buildings. I make a first-draft attempt.
• This exercise reveals the importance of the continuity between (loosely) the Victorian period and the Modern period. In other words, if you wanted to write an architectural history of “The Thermostat Age,” you’d include a lot of content from the 19th century (and even earlier).
• This conclusion surprised me, because in conventional architectural history there is great emphasis on the discontinuity between Victorian and Modern.
• Complexity: Engineer Peter Rumsey and scholars such as Henrik Schoenefeldt and Vidar Lerum have recently emphasized the importance of Victorian-era environmental technologies, but for a different purpose—to design lower-energy “green” buildings (in the post-Thermostat Age).
• Whether or not we adopt “The Thermostat Age” terminology, it is useful and challenging to think of highly-serviced buildings as a category (not a style) and to recognize that this category seamlessly spans the 19th and 20th centuries.

Solar Futures: The View from 1965

How did the profile of future energy sources look in 1965? Here’s a graph presented by L. P. Gaucher, researcher for Texaco, at the Solar Energy Society Conference in Phoenix, and published in Solar Energy*.

The accompanying text includes some statements that appear wrong (now, in retrospect)…
“Natural gas probably will be the very first source of energy to become in short supply.”
“For the coal industry, things look rosy.”
…and some prescient statements:
“over the longer range, say fifty to a hundred years from now, means of transmitting electric power to moving vehicles on the highways may have been perfected.”
“as the cost of liquid fuels increases, their uses for some purposes may have to give way to competing sources of energy, notably electrification.”

*Gaucher, Leon P. “Energy sources of the future for the United States.” Solar Energy 9, no. 3 (1965): 119-126.

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Previously on the blog:
Solar Futures: The View from 1979
Solar Futures: The View from 1978
Solar Futures: The View from 1973
Solar Futures: The View from 1952

The Trombe Wall and the Penny Farthing

ArchDaily published an article on the Trombe Wall. Some quick reactions:

• To learn the full history of the Trombe wall, please seek out my book!

• It is authentically difficult to write about the relevance of historical methods to architecture today.

• The ArchDaily article is an interesting summary and generally accurate, but to my mind it buries the lede. Near the end is the line: “A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the Zion National Park Visitor Center found that 20% of the building’s annual heating was supplied by its Trombe wall.” This is a new-ish building and these are significant savings.

• I’m not interested in criticizing the author, but let’s simply acknowledge that ArchDaily is using student-interns to create serious content. This is the reality of architectural publishing.

Then on Twitter, Nick Grant posted:

Now here is an interesting question! Is the Trombe Wall comparable to the Penny Farthing? This raises deep issues of history, technology, and architecture. I have many scattered thoughts:

• Technologies that are revolutionary and good in their time only seem quaintly ‘transitional’ in retrospect. For technologies or products or methods today, it’s difficult to know if they are mature or transitional. Your favorite Passivhaus housing project might look like a Penny Farthing someday. I’ll be bolder: it probably will.

• Does the Trombe Wall work? Yes.

• What are its fundamental limitations? 1) The heat stored during the day radiates both directions at night. Much is lost outward through the glass. 2) Thermal control is difficult. You might have overheating in some spaces and times.

• Limitation 1 can be addressed by moveable insulation or heavy curtains, but low-tech solutions requiring user engagement aren’t popular in the green building community today. This is cultural. Limitation 2 can be addressed by asking people to tolerate a larger range, or use different spaces at different times. Likewise, this isn’t popular in the green building community today and also cultural.

• If you assume the Trombe Wall is like the Penny Farthing, you are assuming that it can’t evolve into something better (like a chain-and-sprocket bicycle). I don’t agree with this assumption.

• The better version of the Penny Farthing was a different bicycle, but same category of thing. As Nick suggests, the chain-and-sprocket technology was a major advance. Is it analogous to say insulation and air-tightness is the better version of the Trombe Wall? I’m not sure about that. Not the same category of thing.

There is no doubt that newer Passivhaus techniques (insulation, air-tightness, etc.) are more effective at reducing energy and providing comfort than older Passive Solar/Trombe Wall techniques. Yet it’s true that the Trombe Wall is not obsolete, because it works as a limited low-technology solution to collect and store free heat. With vastly reduced heating needs, can they be used together? Trombe parapets? Trombe curtains? Trombe furniture?