A solar house for the Dutch

Abstract

‘What are the aesthetic implications of designing with nature?’1 A question that Ralph Knowles tried to answer in his paper Solar Aesthetics and that immediately attracted my attention, so much that I tried to make it my aim for the project. Following the decision to design a house in northern Italy, the most direct and simple response to nature that could be proposed had to deal with the sun energy - which is abundant - and subsequently with the issues of orientation and thermal storage.
The resulting proposal is for a single-storey house, occupying the smallest footprint possible in order to minimise any impact on the surrounding landscape, which design pays special attention to the orientation of the layout in order to exploit the sun energy to its fullest. Also, the main material chosen for construction is timber (both for structure and cladding), an environmentally friendly material which is able to give a ‘natural look’ to the construction.
Usually a solar house utilises the sun energy through the mean of thermal mass. However the use of brick or concrete construction would result very chunky and would have a much bigger impact on the surroundings and on the embodied energy needed. In fact both brick and concrete have an higher embodied energy than timber, and this doesn’t have to do only with the manufacturing of the material but also with transportation and on-site construction, as heavier materials are more difficult to transport and to assemble. In order to avoid the problem of thick walls due to the use of thermal mass, the use of Phase Changing Materials is proposed. The considered embedding of this material in internal and external walls allows for the dwelling to maintain a constant temperature of around 23 degrees without the need of a central heating system most of the time, as PCM have a melting point temperature which is close to the thermal comfort needed by people.
These materials are also embedded within a south facing glazed facade, which changes its aesthetics over time together with the changing state of the material. In fact, during the day when the PCM is melted the glazed facade allows views through to the exterior, while at night when the PCM freezes it creates a layer in between interior and exterior, obstructing the view. These ‘rituals of transformation supply syntax by rhythmically connecting our experiences to special places and activities in a dwelling.’2
However, designing with nature is a difficult task; ‘buildings are subject to the same natural forces that have cause differentiation in nature, but they rarely acknowledge these forces in built form’3, which is what happened to this project. The dwelling in fact responds well to orientation issues in the layout of the different spaces, but it doesn’t in terms of shape and architectural representation, stuck in the archetypal form of the house, a rectangular shape with a pitched roof. On the contrary, ‘the concept of a building as an ecological form, differentiated in response to natural forces, points to a new aesthetics’.4

1 Ralph L. Knowles, Solar Aesthetics
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.