buildings
The Moral Dimension of the Skyscraper
The skyscraper is a monument to power and the money-makes-right moral triumph of the people who built it. And in an ascendant America, though the richest might have financed the construction, all who were living in the country could share in the pleasure of knowing that it was Americans who were able to spend the most money. Our rich could beat up their rich. In the salad days of Dubai, the same financial force was on display.
Video: A Ride Down San Francisco’s Market Street, 1905
Absolutely stunning footage of downtown San Francisco in 1905. Check out how multi-use the streets were. Pedestrians, automobiles (some probably gasoline-powered, others electric and steam), street cars, horse-drawn carriages.
I could go on about the various energy systems represented here, but just watch this video. It’s incredible.
If you like this stuff, and you live in [...]
1944: “Sun May Aid Heating of Postwar Homes”
“The sun may be harnessed to serve as an auxiliary heating unit in postwar homes, through proper arrangement of large picture windows,” wrote the Washington Post in 1944.
Many other journalists were also high on the technology, largely because of experiments in the Chicago suburbs conducted by the architect George Keck with double-paned Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Company [...]
What Levittown Got Right
You probably know Levittown as the place where America went wrong, if you’re a sustainability nerd. The tract home development in Long Island became the model, so we’re told, for all kinds of suburban development, setting the nation on a path to oil addiction and high energy usage.
But the more I look into the place [...]
1975 Forecast: 20% of New Buildings in 2000 Will Be Solar Equipped
“Solar Heating and Cooling will be used for supplementary energy in the new-building market, particularly multiple-family dwellings. Life-cycle costs will become comparable with fossil fuels in the 1985 time period, and it is expected that 20% of all new buildings in the year 2000 will be equipped with supplementary solar power systems.”
— American Association of [...]
SERI Archive: Two Forgotten Government Solar Programs That Worked
Document: A Solar Explosion [Downloadable PDF]
Authors: Bruce Baccei
Date: 1981
Notes: Presented at the AS/ISES Sixth Passive Solar Conference, Portland, OR, September 8-12, 1981
Task Number: 1122.20
Abstract: The Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) and the Department of Energy (DOE) Passive Solar Manufactured Buildings and Solar Home Builders Programs are developed much needed cost and performance data on solar [...]
How Tech Gets Adopted: Air Conditioners and iPhones
Question: How many air conditioners were sold in 1947? Answer: 47,000.
By 1953, that number had mushroomed to 1,045,000. In 1970, 6 million units were sold.
This leap is astounding even by iPhone standards. Of course, with each unit installed in a poorly insulated house, the amount of energy that Americans used per capita rose.
In Adam Rome’s [...]
SERI Archive: How Do You Sell Passive Solar to the People?
I’ve returned from Golden, Colorado with a bag full of documents from the early history of the Solar Energy Research Institute, now known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. None of them are available online, so short of going to Golden, they are exclusively available here on Inventing Green.
I focused my research on the period [...]
“A swimming pool becomes an automatic decontamination bath”
What a feature! That’s surely from a house built for THE ATOMIC AGE!
“A swimming pool that becomes an automatic decontamination bath during an A-bomb attack is one of the features of a home that Hal B. Hayes, Hollywood contractor, is completing himself,” we read in Popular Mechanics, beneath a lovely photo of a woman drinking [...]
Solar Towers and Their “Spatial Byproducts”
We read on infranetlab.org about the the solar updraft tower, “a combination of a solar chimney, greenhouse and wind turbine.” Yet another example of an old technology made new, this particular kind of solar machine was first dreamt up in 1903 “by Spanish Colonel Isidoro Cabanyes in the magazine La Energia Electrica.”
The solar tower exploits [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
