Are there good ways of getting solar cells (PV) onto old buildings? So far, I’d have to say No—one gets gleaming rectangular grids on tiled or shingled roofs above weathered walls, and the result is a monstrous hybrid. Peace has yet to be achieved between the industrial look and the artisanal.

A solar panel is always going to be an industrial thing in itself. Silicon vapor deposition isn’t done by artisans; the craft and skill are industrial. But putting the panels into or onto the roof can have an artisanal element. I imagine some kind of framing that sits between panels, maybe projecting a little above them, so the plane of the roof isn’t uninterrupted and mirror-smooth. And maybe some decorative elements, like the crestline of the older glasshouses. Maybe even a change in layout (orientation? proportions?) at the ridgeline and/or eaves, to say visually that the panels know they are part of the particular roof. I thnk those things could be done without reworking the whole structure of support and waterproofing, the way skirting boards deal with the join between wall and floor. But not only at the very edges. There should be some modulation or punctuation of the surface.
I think this is mostly a problem of drawing, i.e. of trying things out visually. Well, it’s a problem of mentality, too. There’s an industrial mentality and an artisanal one, and they don’t readily go together. But we should remember that some industrial products fit artisanal work quite well. Bricks. Trim. And there’s an in-between realm of work where molds and templates govern the general shapes and forms, and handwork does the essential finishing.
PVs need framing. That’s the one-liner. And the framing needs to be suitable to the situation. It has a functional job to do, and it needs to have the right feeling. There must then be a variety of ways of doing it, just as there are varieties in the framing of windows and doors. Doors have doorways. Roofs already have ridgelines and bargeboards, not to mention chimneys, dormers and other interruptions. These can be modern or traditional, and each of those umbrella categories has all sort of variation, actual and possible, within them.

Here is the start of a short essay I’ve just added to the Writing and Speaking section: “I have a personal mantra which is close to the surface when I think (or have feelings) about sustainability: ‘We will only sustain a world we find worth sustaining.’ Much of the breadth and profundity of the sustainability challenge is wrapped up in these words, because the ‘we’ who do the work of sustaining will have to be very many disparate yet cooperating people.

The rest of the micro-essay is in the entry called Sustain-able and Sustain-willing. I’m also adding to the Teaching and Learning section a preliminary short statement of a course that could explore the question of who is entangled with whom in the present eco-social dispensation.

I’m re-reading with great pleasure Steele’s Ecological Architecture: A Critical History. Today I’m looking at the six-page chapter on Rudolf Schindler. Steele is interested in the way he genuinely unified indoor and outdoor space and experience. Los Angeles set up very favorable conditions, and Steele finds him to be the one who most thoroughly seized the opportunity, already in the 1920s
There’s an important connection to be made between this character of Schindler’s work and the early going of the Top Ten Toolkit, very much part of today’s scene. It is part of COTE/AIA effort in 2018 to make patterns out of the substantial portfolio represented by the Top Ten projects, 20 years’ worth. The passage that caught my eye comes early on, in Measure 1—Design for Integration:

If you can do only one thing…
1. Design a building to lift the spirits and delight the senses.
Of the three Vitruvian virtues — firmitas, utilitas, and venustas — the following nine Measures of sustainable design [i.e. Measures 2-10] will cover best practices for the first two. Integrating Strategies for achieving Firmitas, or firmness and Utilitas, or function, might be difficult, but the formulas are relatively straightforward. If a design team adheres to the rules of thumb for daylight, the resulting building will be well lit or if a project team provides native habitat, the site’s biodiversity will benefit. Developing Strategies for Venustas, designing a building that delights, is a much more difficult endeavor. 

I’ve become sensitized to delight as a pressing issue from pursuing the ‘sustain-willing’ insight, namely that getting to sustainability requires more than -ability, it requires -willingness as well. Like many, I care about beauty, spirit, delight, but have largely contented myself with applauding them when they appear without feeling that they could be campaigned for.
My professional history has, however, taken me along some stepping stones to a more assertive, activist place. The Evergreen program, In the Presence of Beauty; Christopher Alexander on beauty as a covert issue in community design reactions; the presentation of food in Japan, even in low-end places; and so on. They deserve some reflection and articulation, but not here. Here I should just loop back to some of what Steele has to say about Schindler:

[The King’s Road house] presages all of the environmental principles later labelled as ‘sustainability’ in the late 1980s and early 90s: low embodied energy, high thermal mass in the concrete outer walls and floor, natiral ventilation induced by slidding screen internal walls, and the fficienct use of a renewable resource in its timber structure. (p.80)
By removing the intervening walls of glass that Mies van der Rohe had imposed, Schindler finally managed to sweep away Loos’s fears [that the modern world is so harsh that homes should keep it at bay], providing a prototype for a liberated modernism. (p.83)