solar totems
Principle Investigator - Alex TimmerUniversity of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI
2019
Passive environmental strategies take on two performative regimes: material and geometric. The material regime leverages the inherent properties of matter to mediate an ecological condition. Thermal mass, for example, leverages a materials heat capacity to temper diurnal shifts in temperature. The geometric regime leverages formal relationships, such as solar angles, to block unwanted solar radiance and heat gain.
Passive environmental strategies take on two aesthetic regimes: pattern and object. Throughout architectural history, each of these aesthetic responses to environmental conditions has been driven by cultural, technological, intellectual, and economic factors. From a formal standpoint, both of these approaches are at opposite ends of the aesthetic response to the environment. One sees pattern and system as its medium. For example, the Mashrabiyya, a traditional Arabic wooden screen used for ventilation, celebrates the pattern. We might consider this response a system within the system, one aesthetic systems mediating an environmental system. The second takes a brute force approach to controlling environmental forces. The overhang, for example, could be considered the dam within the river, an obstruction to the flow of energy