you know that TV show that tears down and rebuilds peoples homes? Wouldn't it be wonderful if this could become the new national pastime-instead of football and soaps? Maybe we could get the football teams and soap stars to help-then they could be REAL heroes.

What is cool and sexy? Learning how to build green homes.

In Hawaii there are homes made of cinderblock bricks, with cement floors and tin roofs. They are hurricane, termite and fireproof-I don't know about tornadoes. I don't know how you would insulate them for the midwest, but I bet there is a way.

Community gardens, a greenbelt around the town..a local dairy and farmers market. Maybe they could get rid of cars!
I can dream can't I?

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Solar Today magazine (March/April 2006) described a creative way to encourage the retrofitting of large older buildings of indifferent architecture with solar-electric and solar-thermal technology and other sustainability-increasing retrofits, 'Picturing Solar Makeovers: To encourage the design of photovoltaic-integrated architecture, let's redesign existing buildings -- virtually'.

An excerpt:

There is a tremendous opportunity to put solar energy technology to work on the enormous stock of existing buildings and to create some beautiful new architecture in the process. And this work can be started on many buildings immediately, in a virtual sense.

Using the capabilities of architectural design software, architects could retrofit the outside walls and roofs of numerous not-so-architecturally distinguished high-rise and medium-rise buildings from the 20th century — mostly the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s — with creatively designed fittings and features that incorporate photovoltaic panels, glasses, and materials. A variety of stylish PV-integrating, heat-reducing louvers, wall-covering panels and window shades and overhangs — both modular and one-of-a-kind — can be designed for installation on the unadorned sides of the minimal-design apartment buildings and multi-story commercial buildings found in cities worldwide. An array of attractive pyramids, domes, spires and other structures designed and constructed to support solar photovoltaic panels and arrays — and, where feasible, also solar thermal devices and fiber-optic daylighting concentrators and lensing — can be designed for the roofs of substantial commercial buildings such as retail stores and offices.

These solar energy-generating recreations of existing buildings — “Solar Makeover Buildings” — can be created quickly and in multiple versions, as beautiful graphic proposals by architects and architecture students for the consideration of their owners and stakeholders and the architecturally interested public. Architects then can offer online pictorial presentations of these designs, consisting of “Now” photographs of selected large- and medium-scale buildings paired with their potential solar-retrofitted “Future” versions: digital graphic recreations of the structures, based on current photos, that depict them in one or more "solarchitectured” versions.

Many existing structures could benefit from a solar-retrofit design that complements and honors the original design while adding solar energy-generating and solar-passive-design fixtures and features.

How to implement Solar Makeovers? A one-time or ongoing Solar Makeover Architecture Design Competition could encourage this design activity, compelling the attention of architects and the public alike. PV-interested private owners or public-sector managers could submit photographs of their buildings, while architects and solar designers might submit photos to nominate other buildings. These images would be used by solar architects and designers to digitally create their proposed solar-makeover designs.

Organizations such as the American Solar Energy Society and the AIA might team with PV manufacturers and the makers of architectural CAD software to sponsor a Solar Makeover Architecture design competition and publish the resulting images. A 'virtual city' of numerous Solar-Makeover designs and images might be offered in one online place, a visually inspiring virtual City of the Sun, an aborning 'Solartropolis.'

This exercise in the imaginative design of new architectural elements on existing buildings will accelerate the deployment of solar energy devices and progress toward renewable energy. And these designs will create elements of a more exuberant, elaborate and environmental 21st-century architecture.

Gregory Wright, greg@newciv.org

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