Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [46]
The scene seemed perfectly set for one of the major housing developers to adopt the new technology and use it to pitch to their lowerincome clientele on the value of their homes. But solar planning required care and attention to detail. Without a skilled architect, solar homes could certainly go awry. One 1947 study found that for a particular solar home in Illinois, the heat lost at night through the large windows was greater than the heat captured by the glass during the day.13 A modern architect looking back at the Libbey-Owens-Ford book also found much with which to take issue. Mainly, only Keck and Pietro Belluschi seemed to know what they were doing, and even they seemed to limit technical discussion of their ideas in the book. In 2008 Anthony Denzer, an architect at the University of Wyoming, wrote,
None of the designs explored more advanced issues of passive solar heating that should have interested a progressive architect in 1947. None addressed, even in general terms, the primary underlying objective of saving energy by reducing mechanical heating and cooling needs. None discussed how they had arrived at the amount of glass area relative to the volume behind it.14
As the 1950s began, developers did not want to deal with experts with their own sense of how a housing development should be planned and built. Not even the most basic features of solar planning—like south-facing windows—could be accommodated in the new subdevelopments. For example, the brothers who built the country’s most famous suburb, Levittown, New York, chose to offset the aesthetic dullness of the Cape Cod homes by varying the houses’ orientation to the street. Developers were simply not keen on anything that would add complexity to their projects. As environmental historian Adam Rome has noted about the scale of this buildout, every year from 1950 to 1970, an area the size of Rhode Island was bulldozed for suburban tract housing. 15 Thus, creating such massive amounts of homes required a certain strict dedication to speed and scale. In his blistering 1957 attack on developers, The Crack in the Picture Window, journalist John Keats wrote,
The typical postwar development operator was a man who figured how many houses he could possibly cram onto a piece of land and have the local zoning board hold still for it. Then he whistled up the bulldozers to knock down all the trees, bat the lumps off the terrain, and level the ensuing desolation. Then up went the houses, one after another, all alike, and none of those built immediately after the war had any more floor space than a moderately-priced, two-bedroom apartment. A nine by twelve rug spread across the largest room wall to wall, and there was a sheet of plate glass in the living room wall. That, the builder said, was a picture window. The picture it framed was of the box across the treeless street. 16
Such a builder was, therefore, not exactly interested in the vagaries of designing a passive solar house, even if he was interested in capitalizing on the “solar house” craze by sticking in a picture window.
Sadly, Keck’s solar home prefabricator, Green’s, demoted “the solar house to an experimental level” in order to “concentrate on a less expensive house.” And even after the initial postwar building rush ended, the solar house did not make it back from that experimental level. It was eclipsed by a new model of futurity, which more neatly dovetailed with the desires of real estate developers: the all-electric home.
THE ALL-ELECTRIC DEVELOPMENT
The all-electric home sought to eliminate the elements, providing climate control at a level unthinkable before electricity became nearly free. Home builders realized that incorporating just a single energy source in each house—electricity—reduced their costs and gave them more flexibility with their floor plans, thus permitting them to offer “more house for