Preservation of 1970s Solar Architecture

City of Wheat Ridge, Colorado, Municipal Building, original solar panels removed (link)

I’m working with a collaborator who wants to designate historic examples of solar architecture as an ‘endangered species’. I agree and I’m happy to help!

In fact, in 2019 I identified dozens examples of 1970s solar architecture, located them on Google Maps street view, or found other photos, and determined that the majority of them appeared to be demolished or significantly altered. I concluded:

“Apparently, the loss of 1970s solar architecture has been an unnoticed preservation crisis occurring for years.” (link)

To support the effort to protect this category of buildings, I created these first-draft lists. These are selected examples, chosen for prominence, and very preliminary and incomplete. In most cases my confidence is 99%, based on circumstantial evidence (meaning I haven’t necessarily visited these sites or talked to the owners).

Demonstration houses or buildings destroyed

Solar One by University of Delaware, 1973 (Architect: Harry Weese)
Solar Village by Colorado State University, 1974 (Architect: Richard Crowther). One house remains.
Ohio State University house by Ohio State University/Homewood Corp., Columbus, OH, 1974
Decade 80 Solar house by Copper Development Association, Tucson, AZ, 1975 (Architect: M. Arthur Kotch)
PPG Solar Center by PPG Industries, Harmarville, PA (Allison Park?), 1975
NASA Tech house at Langley Research Center, VA, 1976
University of Tennessee Solar House, 1976
TERA One by Pacific Power & Light/Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Portland, OR, 1977 (Architect: SOM)
Brookhaven House by Brookhaven National Laboratory/DOE, Upton, NY, 1980
Solarex Technology Center, Frederick, MD, 1982

Solar system removed; building intact

New Mexico Dept. of Agriculture Building, Las Cruces, NM, 1975 (Architect: W.T. Harris & Assoc.)
Towns Elementary School, Atlanta, GA, 1975 (Architect: Burt Hill)
Bighorn Canyon Visitor Center, Lovell, WY, 1976 (Architect: Wirth Design Associates)
Santa Clara Recreation Center, Santa Clara, CA, 1977 (Architect: D.C. Thimgan)
Troy-Miami County Library, Troy, OH, 1977 (Architect: Richard Levin & Assoc.)
Wheat Ridge Municipal Building, Wheat Ridge, CO, 1978 (Architect: HDR) see above
Spearfish High School, Spearfish, SD, 1980

Let’s crowd-source this effort! Anything incorrect here? What examples are missing? Please comment.

Now: At the policy level, what should be done about buildings with solar systems which are problematic or defunct, but visibly representative of an important historic moment? I don’t know. These are political questions to be decided by local communities (or federal owners). In my view, the role of an outside expert in preservation issues is to educate, perhaps to offer an opinion, but not to become an activist.

Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance

My new piece “Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance” was published this week in the book Notes from Another Los Angeles: Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape, edited by Anthony Fontenot, from MIT Press. (It’s “new” to the world but not to me, because I wrote this in 2015! Sometimes academic publishing takes a lot of patience.)

The article is based material from on Ain’s FBI file, which I requested in 2012. We already knew that Ain was politically-active on the left, perhaps a Communist Party member, and effectively blacklisted during the Red Scare period. But the FBI documents reveal much more. He was subject to extensive surveillance and was placed on Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Security Index, a top secret list of dangerously subversive individuals. My article analyzes this new material, including some surprising tidbits about the Eames office.

The file, 280 pages, spanning the years 1944-63.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

In case you’re not familiar, Gregory Ain (1908‒1988) was a notable Los Angeles architect. Previously I wrote the book Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary (Rizzoli, 2008), a comprehensive monograph covering Ain’s architecture and its political character, but the full extent of Ain’s targeting by the FBI was not known at that time.

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Edited to add: In The Nation, Kate Wolf described this article as “fascinating,” and she borrowed my line “the most dangerous architect in America” for the title. (I posed that phrase as a question.)

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See also:
Found: Gregory Ain's Museum House
Gregory Ain's Ginoza house

The Greenest Building in the World (at the time)

Some of you surely remember those heady days for the Green Building community, the early-to-mid 2000s. Each year at Greenbuild and other meetings there was tremendous excitement for new building materials & methods, and for new buildings. Greenbuild attracted tens of thousands of people! Who will be next year’s keynote speakers? we wondered. New magazines and websites cropped up like wildflowers. And new contenders for the title ‘Greenest Building in the World’ were eagerly scrutinized. The AIA COTE top ten list was a big deal. The graph below shows that the phrase “greenest building” entered the public dialogue in the late 1990s and soared around 2000.

Lately I’ve been recalling this period, somewhat nostalgically and somewhat critically (see disclaimers below). For the benefit of the historical record, I thought it would be useful and fun to record the buildings that were considered ‘The Greenest Building in the World’ during the past couple of decades. These aren’t meant to represent my own favorite or ‘best’ green buildings but rather those that were the consensus within that community at the time. (If you disagree please comment!) And I’m not defining ‘greenest’ because this was impressionistic, and because priorities changed over the years.

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Prior to 1990, I believe the Greenest Building in the World was considered to be either the Bateson Building (Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe, 1978) or the Monterey Bay Aquarium (EHDD, 1984).

1990: Passivhaus housing in Darmstadt, Bott, Ridder and Westermeyer

1994: Heliotrope, Rolf Disch

1997: Commerzbank Tower, Norman Foster and Partners

2000: Lewis Center at Oberlin, William McDonough + Partners

2003: BedZED (Beddington Zero Energy Development), Bill Dunster, or
Solarsiedlung at Schlierberg, Rolf Disch

2004: Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford, EHDD.

2008: Aldo Leopold Center, The Kubala Washatko Architects

2010: Omega Center, BNIM Architects

2013: Bullitt Center, Miller Hull

Has the Bullitt Center been eclipsed? Maybe? I don’t know! I don’t know because the question doesn’t provoke the same excitement it used to. The Green Building community has evolved beyond its adolescence, surely for the better. As an adult, you come to realize that you can’t say whether Thriller was a better album than Sgt. Pepper’s—masterworks are incomparable.

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Disclaimers:
Yes, Greenbuild was a fully corporate affair; it commodified ecological architecture and tolerated a ton of greenwashing. LEED was poor tool for measuring sustainability.

Pevsner: Architecture and Building

Everybody knows the line from Nikolaus Pevsner:

“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.”

But what follows? How did Pevsner make the argument for distinguishing architecture from ordinary building"?

He was remarkably clear-minded in his thinking. (Maybe I say ‘remarkably’ because very few architectural historians write this way anymore.) He said “the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal,” and then he said there are three ways that a building may provoke aesthetic sensations:

Firstly, in the treatment of walls, with proportion and ornament, like “the leaf and fruit garlands of a Wren porch.” This, he said, is a two-dimensional endeavor, “the painter’s way.”

Secondly, in the manipulation of the three-dimensional form, ”contrasts of block against block.” This is “the sculptor’s way.”

Thirdly, in composing spaces and movement, “the sequence of rooms,” and this skill does not belong to the painter or sculptor but to the architect alone.

These are, then, the three ways that a building may achieve the status of architecture. To conclude, Pevsner wrote:

“the good architect requires the sculptor’s and the painter’s modes of vision in addition to his own spatial imagination. Thus architecture is the most comprehensive of all visual arts and has a right to claim superiority over the others.”

Pevsner wrote this in An Outline of European Architecture (1943).

Houses of Tomorrow exhibition

Updated: The talk can be seen online here.

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I’m happy to promote the exhibition “Houses of Tomorrow: Solar Homes from Keck to Today,” at the Elmhurst Art Museum (outside Chicago) now until May 29. Details here.

I’m confident it’s an interesting and well-organized show. The museum’s curators consulted me when they were conceiving the exhibition and I was happy to give them some feedback. The exhibition begins with Keck’s “House of Tomorrow” for the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition, an all-glass house where Keck inadvertently ‘discovered’ the magnitude of passive solar heating. My book The Solar House (see right sidebar) includes a great deal of analysis of this discovery and of Keck’s subsequent solar houses and their importance.

I’ll be giving a talk on these matters for the museum on April 7, 2022. I’m excited and honored to be cooperating with historian Robert Boyce, the author of Keck & Keck: The Poetics of Comfort (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993). He’s the authority on Fred & Bill Keck, and I’ll probably try to close my mouth and listen!

Finally, it is fitting that the Elmhurst Art Museum is partially located in a glass house: the McCormick House by Mies van der Rohe (1952).