Human beings are rediscovering the sun. New medical findings in the past five years have repeatedly made clear what unimaginable effects the light from our central star has on our health. Sunlight is just as effective against depression as the most common psychopharmacological drugs – but it has far fewer side effects. Sunlight accelerates wound healing and suppresses the sense of pain. What is more, sunlight supplies the body with vitamin D, thus protecting us against cancer, heart diseases and osteoporosis.
But does the rediscovery of the sun also have practical consequences? Richard Hobday, British engineer with many years of experience in solar building, is sceptical about whether mankind will actually be able to turn these findings into a new sort of architecture and appeals in ‘The Light Revolution’ to learn building anew with the sun, with architects working and thinking in terms of harnessing the sun rather than excluding it. ‘The Light revolution’ is about man’s quest to construct more hygienic, better ventilated and better lit buildings – in a nutshell, healthier buildings. His protagonists are a rather different collection from those who generally emerge in books concerning architectural history: Imhotep, who was a doctor, high priest of the Egyptian sun culture and building master in a single person; Vitruvius, in whose work the correct alignment of a building to the sun plays just as important a role as formal aspects; George Bernard Shaw, the Irish writer, who had a revolving shed built with which he could always follow the position of the sun; and Florence Nightingale, the pioneer of modern nursing, who insisted on having direct sunlight in
her wards –
“It is the unrestricted result of all my experience with the sick that their need for sunlight is only exceeded by their need for fresh air...” Richard Hobday did not call the first chapter of his book ‘Nothing New under the Sun’ without good reason. The ancient Romans knew about the disinfecting and psychologically stimulating effect of sunlight. However, the blind confidence in psychopharmacological drugs and antibiotics allowed the positive effects of sunlight to fade into oblivion from about the middle of the 20th century – with fatal consequences as Hobday writes. To mention but a few: Vitamin-D deficiency is rampant throughout the world with over 50,000 people annually falling victim in the USA alone as a consequence; depression will probably have developed by 2020 to become the worldwide second most frequent cause of death; and mankind is experiencing the return of so-called ‘super-bugs’, highly resistant pathogens whose treatment can barely be managed even with antibiotics.
According to Hobday, three factors impede building with the sun. First, direct sunlight is still considered to be injurious to health and a cause of cancer; second, building standards require non-glare for many interiors and therefore favour indirect daylight or even artificial light; and third, the tendency towards energy saving has resulted in buildings in which window areas are minimised and insulating material thicknesses are maximised.
Hobday’s suggestions for how a new “solar architecture” might appear remain rather vague. In fact, the author gives only a sparse number of examples from the 20th century in his book – from Alvar Aaltos’ sanatorium in Paimio to Richard Neutras’ Lovell House in Los Angeles – but their description is altogether too superficial. The strengths of ‘The Light Revolution’ lie clearly in the medicalhistorical area. Hobday supports his thesis of the “healing sun” with a multiplicity of studies and quotations. The fact that he questions a whole number of established beliefs held by from orthodox medicine and architecture makes his book interesting. ‘The Light Revolution’ is a provocative contribution to the debate on future preferences in architecture. As such it should be taken seriously, because he represents a somewhat unorthodox point of view in a highly eloquent and well-founded way.