Solar

Sara Marini
Solar

Keywords
Sun, shadow, solar architecture, energy, diurnism

The Sun, ‘mother’ star of the solar system around which various bodies, including the Earth, revolve, whose fusion core produces energy and releases electromagnetic radiation, a flow of particles and neutrinos. In the last two years, a surge of this radiation caused storms capable of disrupting electrical grid transmissions on Earth. Located in the Orion Arm, the Sun not only significantly influences the climate on Earth, but is also the protagonist of recurring cosmogonic visions – from the ancient Egyptians, to pre-Columbian civilizations, to Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun – that place it at the center of religious and political systems as a source of irradiation and emanation (of life, power, knowledge). Studied and venerated, it has inspired various architectural works and projects that dedicate spaces and territories to it. Omnipresent in the latest modernity as a protagonist to whom we leave space in design and in reality, on which we set orientations, on the basis of which we build rotating buildings, countless projects bear its name or sign such as, for example, the Solar Pavilion by the Smithsons or Villa Girasole by Angelo Invernizzi. The subject of constructions entirely dedicated to welcoming its energy, such as the Solar House by Oswald Mathias Ungers or Haus Regensburg by Thomas Herzog, or design to avoid its irradiation because, as William Atkins writes in The Immeasurable World. Jurneys in Desert Places, ‘You can come to dread the sun, even when shelter and water are at hand: its heat, but also its light. No sooner has it risen than I long for it to set’.

Dino Buzzati
Nothing

Keywords
Fort, desert, immensity, frontier, Tartars

Short excerpt from Dino Buzzati, Il deserto dei Tartari (1945), Mondadori, Milano 2008; En. tr. The Tartar Steppe, Canongate, Edinburgh 2018, pp. 14-15.

Francesco Jodice
Sunstroke

Keywords
Desert, America, West, archaeology, geology

Through a selection of photographs from the series West, the author recounts the rise and decline of the last great Western empire, spanning a period from the onset of the Gold Rush (1848) to the collapse of Lehman Brothers (2008). Undertaking three extensive journeys through the sun-drenched deserts of the American West and one of the planet’s oldest geological formations, the work reinterprets a part of our history through a visual repertoire of myths and ruins, utopias, mirages, and failures: an archaeology of a present already consigned to the past.

Tim Matts
Downstream of Starburn. Accelerationism and the War Against the Sun

Keywords
Accelerationism, geotrauma, Gruppo di Nun, sun, apocalypse

With the concept of ‘solarisation’, the Italian collective Gruppo di Nun reaffirms its involvement in an ongoing ‘occult war’, driven by the ‘geo-traumatic’ tensions described by accelerationist philosopher Nick Land in his 1999 text, Barker Speaks. Like Reza Negarestani before them, they are unable to affirm such tensions as a form of combat; yet their ‘black practice’ is nonetheless a war on the sun, on light, on solar identitarianism. Whereas in Cyclonopedia, Negarestani defines oil as helios-nigredo – or the ‘black corpse of the sun’ – Gruppo di Nun expresses a kindred impulse: through the reversals found in Minor White’s solarised photographs, the stormy excess of the sun – its ‘virulent’ surplus – is drawn toward the disintegration of its own ‘solar tyranny’. This alchemical struggle, these strategies of (self-)annihilation, recall the narrative mise en abyme employed by Don DeLillo in Underworld, where a paradoxical moon assigns an artist an abyssal fate beneath a literary-cinematic volcano.


Agostino De Rosa
Under the Sign of the Kabbalistic Star. Alphabets of Fire and Images Shaped by the Sun

Keywords
Solar projection, projective geometry, representation, Roden Crater, Solar Burn

The role played by sunlight in the works discussed in this paper reveals a function that had already been attributed to the star in ancient times and, more recently, in the perspective treatises of the 16th and 17th centuries: the Sun represented as a form-giving entity, the archetype of a projective process both from a logical-mathematical and an optical-retinal standpoint, through which foreshortened images are generated. This is a kind of burning script, traced by solar projections, which in some cases is likened to the vision of God’s eye, and in others to the recording of secular time, with all its inescapability. In these senses, the images produced over more than ten centuries of history transfigure the pivotal role of solar radiation, identifying it not only as the source of life, but also as a wellspring of inspiration for works suspended between art and science.


Andreas Körner
Thriving Chronodiversity. Contextualising Weathering as Ornament in Architecture

Keywords
Weathering, ornament, surface, atmospheric agents, climate crisis

Exploring the evolving role of architectural ornament in the age of climate crisis, this contribution recontextualises ornament as a dynamic interaction between natural processes and design. Marginalised during the modernist era, ornament is reinterpreted as an integral component of architecture, capable of linking material transformations, ecological systems, and temporal complexity (chronodiversity). The essay investigates the potential of weathering – commonly perceived as a destructive force – as a transformative and generative process that enriches architectural surfaces with both ecological and aesthetic value. Drawing on the rich body of nineteenth and twentieth-century ornament theory and examining selected examples of bio-integrated design, the text highlights a shift towards surfaces that evolve through exposure to natural agents: sun, wind, rain, and atmospheric conditions. Through the use of digital tools, bio-receptive materials, and environmental simulations, ornament emerges as a device for conveying ecological performance and narrative, challenging the traditional dichotomies that oppose form to function.


Alberto Petracchin
In the Shadow of the Pyramid. Magic and Technique in Solar Architecture

Keywords
Solar architecture, pyramid, Georges Bataille, desert, Franco Minissi

The essay investigates the solar nature of the Egyptian pyramid starting from a reflection on the thought of Georges Bataille, according to whom the pyramid would represent a solidified ray of sunlight, capable of radiating meaning and decay. Solar architecture is here understood as both a physical and metaphysical phenomenon, in which monumentality combines with temporality and expenditure. The text considers the desert space not only as a geographical place but as a global condition of thought and design, dominated by light, dust, and loss. Through references to Egyptological studies, contemporary explorations with cosmic rays, and Franco Minissi’s project for the conservation of the Solar Boat of Cheops, the essay highlights how architecture can still position itself today as an emissary of the Sun. The ark designed by Minissi does not represent the Sun but internalizes its force, technically opposing its destructive action. The essay thus proposes an idea of architecture balanced between magic and technique, capable of engaging with the dimension of the cosmos and with the solarization of contemporary space, to renew the bond between Earth and Sun.

Jimmi Pianezzola
Villa no. 3. Solar Device

Keywords
Venetian Villas, solar architecture, irony, diagrams, Dueville

This paper retraces the genesis of Villa no. 3, an architectural project that originates from a play on words, engaging in irony with its context and local toponymy: it presents itself as the ‘third villa’ of the town of Dueville (VI). The three villas of Dueville are inevitably aligned across the landscape in chronological sequence, corresponding to three points connected by an imaginary straight line approximately 2.8 kilometers long. Through photographs and diagrams of solar shading on December 21st of each year, the narrative explores the relationship between the three villas and the sun, Villa no. 3’s principal (im)material building element.


Pier Franco Midali
Viganella Double Sun

Keywords
Solar mirror, Alps, community, solar device, solar engineering

In Valle Antrona, in the upper Ossola region of the Province of Verbania, the village of Viganella (53 inhabitans) is located on the southern slope of a watershed bordering the territory of Montescheno. Immediately below, the Ovesca stream flows from west to east, with its orographic right bank bordered by a high mountain ridge. Positioned to the south of the village, this ridge acts as a natural barrier to winter sunlight. Due to this specific topography, the village remains in complete shade during daylight hours from early November to early February. This account retraces the story of the creation of a new sun for Viganella, a project designed to reflect a beam of sunlight onto the village using a mirror, with the goal of continuously illuminating the main square for at least six hours a day during the sunless months.

Gabriella Liva
The Light Archives. Calculations and Geometry of Aurora Borealis

Keywords
Aurora borealis, Carl Størmer, mathematical calculation, parallactic photographs, magnetic fields

The section dedicated to Carl Størmer (1874-1957), Norwegian mathematician and amateur photographer, presented at the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), illustrated his interdisciplinary approach, which combined mathematical calculation with photographic documentation of the aurora borealis. Drawing on the archives of the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, the exhibition highlighted Størmer’s analytical rigor in observing and measuring auroral phenomena, demonstrating how photography served as a fundamental tool for obtaining precise data on the altitude and position of atmospheric glows. Beginning with his work The Polar Aurora (1955), which integrates observational data, geomagnetic calculations, and spectroscopic reflections through a three-dimensional translation of the identified trajectories, this paper offers a historical contextualization of the aurora borealis, tracing a path from mythological interpretations to the scientific understanding of solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field, through the figure of Størmer and other key contributors such as Birkeland and Carrington.


Valter Scelsi
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

Keywords
François Rodolphe Corréard, gnomon, dark room, sundial, astronomy

InAt a time we cannot precisely determine, but which lies between 1771 and 1773, the Jesuit mathematician François Rodolphe Corréard arranged the construction of a gnomonic line inlaid into the slate floor of a room on the third floor of the Jesuit college in Via Balbi, Genoa. Corréard’s astronomical work retains more than one mystery, and his camera obscura sundial, left incomplete and inactive for centuries, is a typological illogic. An illogical that has determined the possibility of its reconstruction that this contribution archives. In the reconstructive investigation of scientific phenomena, in our attempt to understand them, it should be their epistemic value that guides us. When this factor is obscured, disappearing or becoming compromised for some reason, our capacity for understanding is altered, as the social dimension of the phenomenon fades, leaving only the epistemic one.


Silvia Berselli
How Does the Sun Enter the Atelier? A Non-exhaustive Excursus on Natural Light in Places of Artistic Creation

Keywords
House-studio, architecture and light, natural light, Auguste e Gustave Perret

IThis paper explores the evolving relationship between artists and natural light within the spatial context of the artist’s house-studio. From the technological ingenuity of Leonardo’s lighting solutions, or the dimly lit environments favoured by Caravaggio, to the revolutionary impact of modernity – with its introduction of large glass windows and artificial lighting – the study argues that artists throughout history have modulated natural light according to their individual sensibilities, creative needs, and the technological means of their time. The space of the house-studio thus emerges as a site for investigating and harnessing sunlight as a working tool, highlighting how different uses of the light source can, in turn, influence the architectural design of creative spaces.


Pierluigi Grandinetti
A Group of Towers on the Horizon. About Gianugo Polesello’s Project for the Schio Competition

Keywords
Ars combinatoria, Gianugo Polesello, architectural composition, Lanerossi, city

Gianugo Polesello’s design for the 1980 competition for the Lanerossi site in Schio served as an opportunity for experimental exploration of several underlying theoretical issues, chief among them, a conception of architectural composition as an ars combinatoria. The project is articulated through various ‘parts of the city’, and at its heart stand three cylindrical towers, each fifteen storeys high, which are the focus of this contribution. These towers appear like celestial bodies striving to reach the sun.

Giulia Bersani, Davide Zaupa
Noor CSP. Solar Deserts

Keywords
Solar power plant, Ouarzazate, solar energy, Cartesian architecture, Powers of Ten, Noor CSP

At the intersection of the 31st meridian and the 6th parallel, an endless expanse of parabolic mirrors blankets the sands of the Saharan desert, reflecting the solar rays they capture on the surface of their panels toward a constellation of focal points. Located approximately 10 km from the town of Ouarzazate, in the Drâa-Tafilalet region, the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant inscribes its geometries and architectures at the boundaries of the human landscape. On one hand, in fact, the geographic position of the thermodynamic solar plant evokes considerations and reflections framed within the anti-urban imagination of the desert; on the other hand, the overall extension and the site’s planimetric design require a solar viewpoint to be perceived in their entirety. Starting from the extreme limit of this boundary, situated at the edge of the last layer of the atmosphere, the contribution investigates the numerical and quantitative dimension of the North African solar plant through an oscillatory movement that descends from the general to the particular, and vice versa. Similarly to the Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames, the paragraphs of the text and the sequence of related drawings adopt the power of ten as a narrative and conceptual device through which to analyse the spatial properties and characteristics of a data-oriented architecture, or more precisely, of a Cartesian architecture.


Francesca Belloni
Greenhouse: Inhabiting and Building the Poetics of the Sun. Lacaton & Vassal’s Eighteen Logements in Rixheim

Keywords
Greenhouse architecture, social architecture, free space, Pritzker Prize, winter garden

From the 17th century to the late 19th century, the widespread adoption of buildings based on the greenhouse principle progressively blurred the boundary between interior and exterior, transforming the relationship between architecture and landscape through extensive use of glass. Originally tied to agricultural and botanical functions, this constructive tradition experienced a radical reevaluation in the second half of the 20th century, when designers such as Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal explored its typological, compositional, and climatic potentials. Their poetics centers on the use of natural light as a primary element for spatial quality, surpassing mere technological or sustainability concerns. The greenhouse thus becomes a design archetype and a tool to extend living space with lightness, transparency, and openness, promoting bioclimatic comfort and a fluid connection with the external environment. The Rixheim intervention, examined in this paper, reflects the transformation of the greenhouse into a stylistic and compositional code that emphasizes humble, industrial materials, constructive simplicity, and economy of means. The concept of ‘free space’ highlights the generosity and flexibility of environments capable of accommodating changing uses while fostering inclusive and open quality of life. For Lacaton & Vassal poetics prevails over formal language in an essential and pragmatic architecture aimed at enhancing light and space as absolute protagonists, reaffirming architecture as a place of life and freedom.


Simone Gobbo
Sans Titre Cosmologies and Amnesias in BAST’s M26 Project

Keywords
Toulouse, objet trouvé, tent, city, reuse

The fragmented condition of Toulouse’s residential fabric offers the ideal experimental context for M26, an architectural emblem of Studio BAST’s programmatic approach. In the case of the Toulouse-based designers, it is impossible to separate individual design interventions from their intense relationship with the city itself, and above all their projects cannot be regarded as isolated or independent episodes. Their design research unfolds as a kind of synaesthesia of executions, a solar cosmology enclosed within seemingly marginal episodes. In the out-of-fashion wardrobe of the suburban void where the M26 project will take shape, two separate houses with distinct orientations are brought together with the intention of forming a unified whole, to imagine a condition of continuity where previously there had been the interruption of design absence. The solution is distilled into a single gesture, both utilitarian and poetic: a new line of shadow that traces the sun’s movement and, rising from the ground, becomes a sheltering structure. A wooden and glass veranda tapers in plan, generating a spatial tension like an arc of light and shadow poised to release its force.


inter- with Živilė Mantrimaitė
Solar Laboratory. Re-powering The Domestic

Keywords
Solar energy, microwaves, renewable energy, community, rituals

The contribution explores the evolution of the relationship between energy and domestic life, beginning with the invention of the microwave oven by Percy Spencer, which revolutionized cooking practices by reducing preparation times and transforming the home into an energy-consuming and invisible system. Despite the abundance of energy accumulated on the planet, its management remains abstract and disconnected from natural origins, generating excesses and inequalities, such as energy poverty, which disproportionately affects women. This work proposes a reflection on the regenerative potential of solar energy, illustrated through a collective experiment in Lithuania, where this form of energy powers domestic prototypes that reconnect daily routines with natural cycles, transforming energy from a mere resource into an active agent of life. This transition invites a rethinking of living spaces as dynamic systems, integrated with renewable energies for a sustainable lifestyle. The contribution argues for the necessity of a profound change in the perception and use of energy to address global environmental challenges.

Sandro Rolla
Hidden Shadows. China’s Dual Soul

Keywords
Shadow, infrastructure, modernity, contradictions, public space

This article explores the theme of shade in the subtropical regions of southern China, where bright light and heat profoundly influence daily life and urban culture. Through a journey by bicycle, a symbol of pre-modern time and a slow pace, the text and photographs investigate the use of residual spaces under viaducts and modern infrastructure, which are transformed into social and cultural microcosms. The shadows created by large structures become spontaneous shelters, generating new practices and configurations of public space. The narrative develops as a ‘bottom-up’ reading of contemporary Chinese architecture, in which modernity and tradition, technology and local resilience are intertwined. The shadow, an architectural and symbolic element, emerges as a metaphor for the balance between the desire for innovation and the preservation of cultural roots.


Anna Liva Friel, Marco Provinciali con Giovanna Silva
Quebra-sóis. Technology and Abstraction in Brasilia

Parole chiave
Brise-soleil, Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer, tropical modernism, journey

The trajectory of Brazilian modernist architecture can be narrated through three emblematic journeys: Le Corbusier’s 1929 trip to Latin America, which later influenced the design of the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro; President Juscelino Kubitschek’s journey to establish Brasilia as a symbol of postcolonial national identity; and, finally, the journey of architects, builders, and technologies toward Brasilia, the first city designed by and for the airplane. This trajectory also reflects the process undertaken by architects to adapt modernist principles to tropical climates and solar power. The brise-soleil, a hallmark of Brazilian modernism, encapsulates this evolution, transforming from a functional technical element into a key component of the symbolic construction of the new capital.

Studio Other Spaces (Ólafur Elíasson, Sebastian Behmann)
A Solar Study in Light and Reflection. Common Sky and Vertical Panorama Pavilion

Keywords
Light, space, environment, pavilions, construction, sky

In the work of Studio Other Spaces (SOS), founded by artist Ólafur Elíasson and architect Sebastian Behmann, light is not merely a source of illumination but a transformative force in architectural spaces, an active participant in shaping the sensory and emotional experiences for users moving through space. In collaborations which merge art, architecture and the natural world, SOS crafts environments that evolve continuously, responding to the conditions of their surroundings. SOS’ architectural projects integrate sunlight and environmental conditions into the fabric of the design to build immersive experiences. The interaction of light with glass and mirrors creates dynamic relationships between structure and natural environment, guiding visitors through journeys that shift constantly in time. Built under the different skies of two distant corners of the United States, Common Sky and Vertical Panorama are two examples of such approach, of careful design work aimed at using solar light as a central element in the construction of space.

Hugo de Almeida Pinho
Solar Capital

Keywords
Solar capitalism, capitalocene, green washing, biopolitics, solar technology

The first photographs ‘heliography’ were called ‘light images’. For this reason, Charles Baudelaire described the first photographers as ‘sun worshipers’; the Latin expression sol fecit (‘the sun did this’) was a signature inscribed on the first photographs; and, the oldest use of the camera obscura was to observe phenomena related to the sun. Photographic images have thus an intrinsic relationship with sunlight: both analogue and digital images are a sign of civilization’s attempt to control the sun. Over the past few years, my artistic work has engaged in a metaphorical and physical journey into the sun. I look up places as the Noor, the largest solar complex energy plant in the world, located in Ouarzazate (Morocco), a city known as the door of the desert. Ouarzazate has attracted several international film productions, giving it the epithet Ouallywood. The city is home to one of the largest open-air film studios in the world, becoming a paradigmatic location where are recreated diverse geographies and temporalities. If it was the connection with sunlight that furthered the city’s connection with cinema, it would also be this association that lead to the creation in Ouarzazate of a controversial solar megaproject that seeks to put the country on a ‘green path’. This solar journey was similarly driven to Synlight (Germany), the ‘largest artificial sun in the world’, operated by the DLR Institute of Solar Research, which uses 149 cinema projector lamps to do hydrogen/green fuel production experiments or test materials sent into space; but also to the Spectroheliograph of Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory of the University of Coimbra (Portugal), one of the world’s oldest solar observatory, using an instrument that resembles a camera obscura and photographic device, which daily since 1927 takes a photograph of the solar disk. These places are representations of a contemporary journey that, both energetically and scientifically, uses technology to get closer to or instrumentalize the sun. On the other hand, the sun has an inherent connection to the gaze. If, as these places reveal, optical technologies and instruments mediate the view of the sun, they also depend on this same sunlight for their functioning. This journey to the sun is therefore an intrinsically and self-referential expedition into photography itself: a mise en abyme between light, the sun, the eye and technical images.

Marco Cimillo
Ralph Knowles and the Rise of Solar Architecture

Keywords
Solar architecture, parametric design, sustainability, Ralph L. Knowles, solar envelope

The contribution outlines Ralph Lewis Knowles’ role in the rise of solar architecture, and his pioneering research ethos and methods which harbingered green building, performance-base and parametric design decades in advance of their establishment as mainstream concepts in architecture. Through his concept of the ‘solar envelope’ and an experimental approach to environmental design, Knowles redefined the relationship between natural forces and built form. His work laid a conceptual and methodological foundation for climate-responsive architecture and urbanism, fostering a paradigm shift toward integrating solar geometry, energy flows, and spatial organization. While the significance of his contribution is undisputable, their contemporary implications may be yet to fully unfold.


Filippo Perfetti
Solar Projections. Tacita Dean

Keywords
Cinema, time, light, perception, gnomon

Light manifests itself as a sign: it appears not for what it is, but for what it modifies and leaves behind. It cannot be perceived directly; a mediator is needed. Thus, the Sun is contemplated by looking at the shadow generated on the ground, not at its glow. In this perspective, the observer, the human being, places themselves at the centre of an event: the advent of light on Earth. This may explain why man initially thought of the solar system as geocentric: an experience that becomes thought, more concrete than heliocentrism. The Ptolemaic system orders celestial space according to human perception, a theme that also emerges in Tacita Dean’s films, author who is the subject of this fundamental. Time, like light, is grasped through its signs. It is not measured directly, but through the movements of things, the marks it leaves. Dean notices this: a diaphragm allows us to perceive and record its passage.


Cristina Moraru
The Solar Vision of the Future. A Cosmist Analysis on Anton Vidokle’s film The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun

Keywords
Cosmism, immortality, revolution, solar aesthetics, Anton Vidokle, cosmic energy

This paper explores the symbolic, philosophical, and aesthetic role of the Sun in Russian Cosmism through the lens of Anton Vidokle’s film The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun (2015). Interweaving the thought of figures such as Nikolai Fedorov, Alexander Chizhevsky, and Boris Groys, the Sun is portrayed not merely as a physical source of life, but as a metaphysical force capable of shaping history, revolution, and human destiny. Vidokle reinterprets Cosmism’s ideas through cinematic language, linking solar cycles to social upheavals and proposing a vision of art as a transformative tool in harmony with cosmic energy. Positioning Cosmism at the intersection of science, art, and politics, the film offers a contemporary reflection on the potential of solar aesthetics to sustain utopian aspirations and a vision of collective immortality. Vidokle’s work serves as a visual manifesto of Cosmism, in which the Sun emerges as a unifying force between nature, society, and the cosmos.


Tommaso Bartoloni
Lightwells in Francesco Venezia’s Work

Keywords
Light wells, museum, hypogeum, Etruscan, exhibition

This paper investigates the interplay between sunlight and architecture, highlighting how sunlight, beyond architect control, shapes architectural form through a rhythmic dialogue of light and shadow. Sunlight’s cosmic dimension influences volumes, surfaces, and spatial perception, anchoring architecture within nature’s cycles. Francesco Venezia’s work provides a critical lens on these themes, especially in his analysis of Le Corbusier’s Tower of Shadows, where architecture serves as a temporal marker. In his 2000 Venetian exhibition, Gli Etruschi, Venezia’s manipulation of spatial elements, colour, and lighting evokes Etruscan hypogeal spaces transfiguring their spatiality in the ephemeral space built up in Palazzo Grassi. The exhibition invites viewers into an immersive experience, where sunlight reveals architecture’s connection to both the cosmic and the human, anchoring it in an enduring spatial-temporal rhythm.


Jacopo Bonat, Matteo Zambon
The Extraordinary Perpetuity of the Fixed Point. The Renazca District Project by Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Keywords
New York, Manhattanhenge, public space, ephemeral, asters

During the period from May 28 to July 13, during the phenomenon known as Manhattan Solstice or ‘Manhattanhenge’, the setting sun aligns with Manhattan’s east-west streets, which become crowded with tourists and onlookers eager to enjoy the event. The sun seems to nestle between the skyscrapers, accompanied by their elongated shadows and the warm, golden light of sunset, creating a dense and emotional setting, almost an immersive warmth that is, in some ways, mystical. The sensationality of the occurrence can be attributed to a system of nearly fortuitous alignments between natural phenomena and human-made artifacts, which during specific, limited periods generate an unconventional event capable of altering our contextual perception. Occasionality, variability, and duration are therefore the mechanisms that produce the extraordinary, which becomes special in our eyes because it is temporary or purely accidental, yet laden with a disorienting component.


Annamaria Prandi, Andrea Vescovini
Fringes. Casa Sassi, a Solar Pavilion by Filippo Monti

Keywords
Solar pavilion, solar machine, villa, nature, Filippo Monti

Casa Sassi, designed by architect Filippo Monti in the 1970s on the hill of San Biagio, near Faenza, constitutes a paradigmatic example of the author’s design approach, characterized by a refined design research aimed at constructing relationships between materials, forms, and the environmental context. The contribution investigates Casa Sassi in relation to its capacity to function as a device for designing living spaces, connected to the vital rhythms suggested by the daily movement of the Sun. From the planimetric composition, achieved by the agglomeration of rhomboidal shapes, to the relationship between form and the ways in which spaces are appropriated, Casa Sassi presents itself as a solar machine – not conceived for its own movement, but rather to set in motion the life that flows within it, in harmony with the solar rhythm. In this sense, the architecture is assimilated to the etymology of the word ‘pavilion’, in which meanings are preserved that are as neglected as they are unexpected.


Vincenzo Valentino
We Have Never Been Copernican. The Years of Solar Investigations in Le Corbusier’s Architecture

Keywords
Le Corbusier, sunrays, brise-soleil, heliocentrism, Unité d’Habitation

Le Corbusier, strong and confident in the new tools produced by modern society, repeatedly attempted to challenge the ‘sun dictatorship’. The heliothermal axis theory, the concept of neutralising wall, and the innovation of brise-soleil represent three key stages in a story that, despite declarations of conversion to a heliocentric perspective, reveals how Ptolemaic geocentrism is deeply rooted in architectural culture. Indeed, the brise-soleil loggia of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles and the Tower of Shadows in Chandigarh exemplify an architecture conceived as a system of control and fixed measure of the cyclical changes of all moving things. At the same time, this story also shows us that perhaps we have never been Copernican because we have never really questioned the profound nature of this incandescent astral matter, this palpable and vibrant substance called light, with which the sun animates the surface and depths of the Earth.


Lorenzo Renzullo
The Mock-up as a Tool of Experimentation. Several Cases of Ignazio Gardella

Keywords
Mock-up, Punta Ala, façade, device, Ignazio Gardella

The use of full-scale mock-ups played a central role in the architectural design process since the second half of the 20th century, contributing to the experimentation of innovative procedural methodologies. Due to their replicative properties – capable of simulating the spatial and material behaviour of the real object – mock-ups were employed to progressively assess the influence of environmental factors on the theorised aesthetic and construction solutions. Spanning the ideation and execution phases, and involving the observer in a kinaesthetic manner, the analytical data conveyed to the object were revised in light of the physical experience conducted in the field. The practice of full-scale models in Italian architectural culture emerges through the singular case of the mock-ups for the Tourist Residential Settlement project in Punta Ala (1962-1966) by architect Ignazio Gardella, aimed at exploring and physically testing the experimental effects of the interplay between natural light and the responsive object.