Best of 2022

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Cheers to 2022! Here are a few notes on the year in review.

Solar House History: The Hunn House
Earlier this year I was happy to see that Bruce Hunn wrote a retrospective piece for the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) website. It reminded me that Hunn, an engineer, built one of the most striking solar houses of the 1970s. A two-story trombe wall—what a remarkable example of solar form! Because of its expressive power, you might be wondering: who was the architect? Hunn designed the house himself, he says, “with the assistance of designer and architect friends.”

Hunn House, White Rock, New Mexico (1976)

The Hunn house is not included in The Solar House; I honestly don’t remember why it did not make it into the final edit. (There were so many examples after 1973!)

Solar Decathlon
I’m loosely involved with the University of Wyoming’s project for the 2023 Solar Decathlon—“Wind River”—which is now under construction near Lander, Wyoming. UW students designed the house and its systems. The project’s emphasis is to show zero-energy houses are market-ready; thus there are no experimental technologies and it is designed in a “Minimal Mountain Modern” style (credit to student Erika Ferrell for that label).
The competition will occur in April 2023 and I’m excited for our student team! We’re collaborating with Cory Toye (Timshel Construction) who is financing and building the project.
Follow along at the project website; new content coming throughout the Spring.

In the past, both in The Solar House and here on the blog, I was fairly critical of the Solar Decathlon. When the Decathlon required transportable houses to be small, transportable (lightweight), and essentially temporary and site-less, I felt that it was sending the wrong message about low-energy and solar architecture. It was also very expensive for schools. Now that the competition is refocused on permanent buildings, local sites, and collaborations with builders, I’m happy to be a part of it.

The Big Roof, redux
A few years ago I christened “The Big Roof” as a new style for signature public buildings. The Big Roof is an expressive environmental feature, providing shade and a greater area for solar panels. Often the roof is formally detached from the main body of the building, with its own structure. Here are some newer examples confirming the trend.

1. Houston Endowment Headquarters by Kevin Daly Architects link
2. Environmental Nature Center and Preschool by LPA Design Studios link
3. Ashes & Diamonds winery by Barbara Bestor link
4. Children’s Surgical Hospital in Uganda by Renzo Piano Building Workshop link
5. Delhi Noida International Airport by Nordic Office of Architecture, Grimshaw, and Haptic link
6. House of Wisdom (Sharjah Digital Library) by Foster + Partners link

Travels: Minneapolis
On a short trip to Minneapolis (my hometown) I only had about an hour of free time, and I stopped at the Walker Art Center and captured this familiar view. And RIP to Claes Oldenburg, who passed away in 2022.

Publications & Talks
• My article “Bruno Mathsson’s Solar Architecture” was published at nonsite.org. Mathsson is well-known as a furniture designer, but he also created a new language of glass architecture for Swedish homes and introduced several environmental innovations. Despite Mathsson’s interest in Fred Keck and the solar house movement, I conclude that his houses could not have delivered energy savings as designed. I wrote a summary here.
• My article “Gregory Ain: Under Surveillance” was published in the book Notes from Another Los Angeles: Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape (MIT Press), edited by Anthony Fontenot. It concludes: “Was Ain the most dangerous architect in America at midcentury? It certainly appears he was viewed as such, within the FBI, and treated as such. Did he earn that distinction willingly? It certainly appears so.” A summary is here, and a review in The Nation is here.
• In August I spoke to the staff of Unity Homes, in New Hampshire, about Swedish house factories.
• In April, with Robert Boyce, I spoke about Fred Keck's 1933 House of Tomorrow for the Elmhurst Art Museum. link to video
• In March I gave a talk called “People who live in glass houses...” to the UW Honors colloquium. It looked at Hardwick Hall, the Palm house at Kew, and the Farnsworth house, through different interpretive lenses.

Historic architecture, plus solar
Check out Gloucester Cathedral!

Bruno Mathsson’s Solar Architecture

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My article “Bruno Mathsson’s Solar Architecture” is published here. Mathsson is an immensely-interesting mid-century Swedish furniture designer and architect. I conclude Mathsson internalized both the ‘glass house’ and the ‘solar house’ as new types, although these “were fundamentally incongruent in concept.” Ultimately he was more interested in the therapeutic and psychological effects associated with glass architecture than in the energy savings promised by solar architecture. (Passive solar energy savings are difficult in Sweden, as the data shows in my article, but Mathsson tried—by inventing Brunopane.)

I also find that Mathsson’s Villa Södrakull (1965) is “a true masterwork of mid-century modernism.” Mathsson imagined “Swedish homes of the future will be a kind of greenhouse with tropical heat,” and here it is, including a green glass floor and tropical textiles by Josef Frank:

Credit: Tina Stafrén / Visit Sweden.

Preservation of 1970s Solar Architecture

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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

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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)

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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.