LIVING WITH THE SUN: ARCHITECTURE AND THE ASSOCIATION FOR APPLIED SOLAR ENERGY, 1954 - 1958
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- Issue Date:
- 2007-10-04T23:13:26Z
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At the end of 1957, a group called the Association for Applied Solar Energy held an international
competition for the design of a solar house, to be built in Phoenix, Arizona. In the mid-1950s –
before the development of the photo-voltaic cell – the use of solar energy in residential design
was both an architectural project and a technological project; in no small part it was an
investigation into architectural design as technology, engaging concerns over site orientation
and cubic volumes as much as ideal angles for solar collection and methods of heat storage.
The 1957 competition, called Living with the Sun, intended to exploit this connection between
design and technology. Parallel with the development of modern architecture as an expression
of a contemporary lifestyle, this early instance of solar architecture intended to allow innovation
in design to produce a new relationship to technology and, by simple extrapolation, to the
material, environmental, and political issues that accompanied the slow depletion of fossil fuel
resources, a phenomenon already becoming clear in the immediate post-war context. Living
with the Sun was thus a straightforward attempt, on the part of architects, to engage
environmental problems.
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