SOLAR ENERGY: HARVESTING THE SUN (3)

AN ARCHITECTURAL APPROACH THROUGH LE CORBUSIER’S GROUNDINGS.

By Dominique Fretin

New building materials and methods, such as concrete that was worshipped and broadly employed by modern architects, provided independent structures that freed the façades allowing wide openings and much more light entrance in the insides.

Concrete structures, walls and floors are also suitable to store heat. When correctly sized and oriented they can provide comfort during the winter days. Aware of those properties Le Corbusier also was committed to technological advances and rather chose building systems and materials that clearly proclaimed the expression of modern industry. Colors, textures and shapes were bound to reflect the refinement, the lean sense of efficiency avoiding all surpluses just like the industrial machine components. Natural resources should be employed in a rational and organized way, through technical proceedings.

Energy issues as regarded in our days are seldom approached by Le Corbusier in his writings. He oppositely seems rather enthusiastic about technical solutions he discovered during his travel in the United States of America in the late 1920. In his book “Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches” (1937), he is bewildered by the successful actions achievable in the “Pays des Watts”[sic] and claims that architecture should seize all new techniques available.

... No windows anywhere... silent walls... Air conditioning is everywhere: pure, dustless and temperature is constant. Am I in the 5^th or 40^th floor, secured within a glazed aquarium?…[3]

… all modern technical devices must be incorporated to architecture, but willing to transcend their simple utility. Such an indispensable goal intends to offer the joys of the heart and of health to the mechanical civilized men[4].

Although Le Corbusier’s concern were guided by functionality, aesthetics, health and a certain “joie de vivre”, when it comes to sun reckoning, most of his projects display the basis of passive solar techniques suitable for energy efficiency. Shapes, structures, materials, openings and its eventual protection seem to have been conceived with this particular purpose.

In the early 1930’ he designed a building for the Salvation Army, bound to shelter homeless: the “Cité de Refuge”. He proposed a glass façade of 1.000 square meters in order to “enlighten the rooms from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall, bringing free and ineffable light and sunshine” (LE CORBUSIER, 1937). As the glassed curtains were sealed, internal comfort was ensured by a central coal heating system during winter times and an electric air conditioning system for the hot summer days. The facilities were open officially in December 1933 and showed off a perfect internal temperature despite the harsh weather conditions. Unfortunately, the building was to be closed by the Police Department, notwithstanding the medical reports and the technical studies bestowed by the ventilation company.

Both postures, on the one side harnessing local natural resources and in the other side using the leading techniques and incorporating them in buildings, may appear self-contradictory. Nevertheless, they are present in all Le Corbusier’s buildings as he looked forward to transform architectural housing into “dwelling machines” by means of using simple and rational building solutions arranged with refinement of shapes, always interacting with environmental strengths.

---

[1] Le Corbusier – Vers une Architecture, 1927.

[2]  Le Corbusier – La Charte d’Athènes, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1957. P. 50.

[3] Le Corbusier, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, Edition Plon, Paris, 1937. P.42.

[4] Idem. P 44.