走向“新的”阳光都市主义

著：（美）查尔斯·瓦尔德海姆 译：邬峻 校：张博雅

当代，关于城市在设计文化中地位的讨论趋向于朝着2个自指的、最终不可调和的逻辑循环发展。一方面，许多关于当代城市设计的讨论沦为对政策、公众参与及治理等社会政治议题的痴迷；另一方面，这些讨论普遍局限于对城市历史上单个地点、项目以及特例的描述。摇摆于这2个城市议程的范围和规模之间，我们似乎失去了将城市设计描述为集体文化项目的潜力。这种笼统的声明显然过分简化了情况，并冒着夸大其词的真实风险。然而，在大多数情况下，一方面，当代城市相关的设计论述和实践在规模、地点和主题上趋向于与政策相关；另一方面，与个体发展项目相关也是不争的事实。

在因政治领导缺失、监管机制不健全或无效公众参与（可惜我们没有合适的市长、开明的治理模式、税收累进优惠制度、受过良好教育的公众等）而导致的广义上的失败中，对城市提案提出批评已变得司空见惯。对一块土地、个人发展兴趣或单一建筑师的身份等相关细节提出这种批评也已经变得不足为奇（千载难逢的机会、解锁单一的城市用地、奥林匹克运动会即将到来、世界上最著名的建筑师等）。虽然这2种批评视野都完全合理且必要，但当代城市设计讨论中最缺乏的似乎是在集体项目规模上表达超越单一项目的利益或价值观的能力，而非城市尺度本身。简而言之，我们似乎已经在场地和规模上都全面溃退，因为忽略了城市形态实际上是集体文化的表现。

在这城市命题萎缩的背后，还有许多充分的历史原因。在这2种情况下，我们都见证了缺乏理性的政治解释、缺乏政治经济大环境的解释，或缺乏对那些直接和即刻投入实质性项目的人的自身利益的解释。当然，这很大程度上是由于自1968年以来的学院专业化以及城市规划和建筑领域所享有的相对自治权。同样，也源于我们关乎政治经济大环境和公民的讨论。在这些讨论中，集体考虑共同利益和成果互利似乎愈发难以实现。在规划学围绕社会议题激进化发展、建筑学围绕学科自治激进化发展之后，谁将为城市文化展开诉求呢？谁有能力表达集体城市形态的潜力？在这种情况下，广义的设计学科，尤其是城市艺术，具有通过发展话语形式和预判力来纠正这种历史形态的潜力。

在关于城市作为设计主题和设计对象的论述中，可能会在日照朝向与城市化之间的关系里找到一个政体与项目和解的潜在性课题。自最早的城市建筑法规出台以来，这一古老的议题就已经出现。但对于设计学科而言，这又是一个很应景的问题。因为该话题有望增强当今社会对生态与城市主义之间关系的兴趣。虽然生态都市主义的许多论述和实践都集中在基于现代水文和生态条件的城市形态生成，但阳光都市主义（heliomorphism）的前景为生态功能与城市形态之间提供了一组新关系。这样，该话题有望使人们对从景观都市主义和生态都市主义到热动力学和城市新陈代谢的一系列主题产生兴趣。不同于与任一特定设计学科相关的技术问题，阳光都市主义建议将城市设计回归为一种集体文化行为。为了避免在建筑文化自主权和城市形态生态参数的决策这二者之间做出错误选择，阳光都市主义提供了第 3种选择。就这一点而言，阳光都市主义的“转向”与热动力学这个主题有很多共同之处，两者均是通过气候、碳、能源和环境的外部驱动因素来动员建筑自主文化生产的议程。

景观都市主义和生态都市主义这2个主题已经引起了人们对与城市形态相关的水文网络及其生态绩效的关注。这些议题仍是许多人关注的焦点，与此同时，“阳光都市主义”给出了一条新的探究思路，通过这种思路也可以构想出“生态都市主义”。

城市形态及其与日照朝向关系的话题一直存在。最早的建筑和城市规划相关的文献强调了城市的朝向、布局以及城市形状与日照朝向相互对应关系的重要性。不论纬度如何，在世界各地的文化中都能找到将“日照权”作为基本社会建构的古代法律。20世纪，该话题一直存在于“作为社会契约一部分的日照权”与“以城市化为途径的、各种形式的资本积累”二者之间，成为两者长期以来矛盾关系的一部分。

一些最早对建筑提出限制的英文法规是基于将日照可获取性作为一项人权并探讨其与城市高层建筑影响之间的张力而制定的。许多现代规划领域的先驱提出过一些项目，通过限制建筑物的高度、退线和朝向，将全时段内日照的最低公平获取量纳入现代城市形态的决定因素。20世纪城市化过程中一些最持久、最有力的城市形象来源于极端社会公平水平条件下的疯狂垂直积累。英国的普通法“日照权”概念塑造了最早的盎格鲁规划形态（Anglo forms of planning）。在其他先例中，这些想法为美国最早的规划法规的形成提供了信息。《纽约区划法令》（New York’s zoning ordinance, 1916年）是其中一个例子，关于日照权的社会契约以城市形态的形式被编纂入法令中。这种集体社会契约的形式也以文化形态印刻在我们接触到的城市意象中。休·费里斯（Hugh Ferris）的《明日的都市》（TheMetropolis of Tomorrow，1929年）将这座城市的文化雄心描绘为人们围绕日照可达性的集体社会公平感。

针对阳光都市主义在当代的回归，笔者建议重新阅读20世纪的建筑和城市史。在20世纪下半叶，许多著名的建筑师和城市主义者探索了阳光都市主义项目的各个方面。包括对德国规划师路德维希·希尔伯西默（Ludwig Hilberseimer）的《新区域格局》（New Regional Pattern，1949年）[1]的重新审视。希尔伯西默的战后计划同样受到了与分散式工业经济主导的空间定位有关的、深刻的社会阳光公平感的启发。这些提示我们重新关注日照朝向的概念是如何影响英国建筑师简·德鲁（Jane Drew）和麦克斯韦·弗莱（Maxwell Fry）的工作。他们著有2本《热带建筑》（Tropical Architecture，1956年、1964年） 以 及《建 筑与环境》（Architecture and the Environment，1976年）[2-4]。美国建筑师拉尔夫·诺尔斯（Ralph Knowles）的设计作品以及他在《太阳节奏形式》（Sun Rhythm Form，1982年）一书中所述的“日照包络体”的概念对于重读阳光都市主义至关重要[5-6]。面对20世纪70年代的能源冲击和经济转型，诺尔斯提出了“日照包络体”的概念。这一对“新”阳光都市主义的前身的重新解读可通过重读同时代其他理论著作而获益，其中包括雷纳·班纳姆（Reyner Banham）的《温和环境中的建筑》（Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment，1969年）[7]。通过解读城市主义最新数字范式的承诺、与日照性能相关的城市形式的城市模型的潜力，这些历史案例将被发扬光大。

加拿大都市主义者弗拉基米尔·马特斯（Vladimir Matus）在1988年出版的《北方气候设计》（Design for Northern Climates）一书中提到了“阳光都市主义的城市空间”的设计。马特斯提出了具有生物学意义的城市项目的潜力：“几十年来，对于各种人来说，最佳环境主要通过能源输入来实现活动……（现在）建筑物可以转变为对环境变化敏感的准生物系统，像花朵一样开放，利用并吸收环境能量。”[8]

这些例子，以及其他无数例子，预示着在城市形态控制过程中争论焦点的形成，围绕着获得最低日照标准权利的抗争，将资本积累与建筑形态的生长聚集对峙起来。竖直方向的生长聚集和水平方向的规范控制之间长期存在的矛盾与争论，基本上定义了现代城市形态和日照朝向的议题。然而，最近建筑师和城市主义者指出了新型太阳能经济的潜力。其中许多项目建议通过扩大日照性能，建筑表现形式和城市形态来超越资本积累与公平获取之间的长期矛盾关系。“新”阳光都市主义的前景暗示了两组各自独立且互相关联的矛盾关系，二者均为城市设计所特有：1）城市作为社会公平的场所与城市作为资本积累的引擎之间的长期矛盾；2）生态过程中的太阳能获取与可再生能源的太阳能获取之间的矛盾关系。总而言之，这些术语提供了与社会、经济和生态参数相关的潜在城市形态与生命政治。阳光都市主义的议程产生了3种不同设计研究模式的交集，使得这种扩展的生命政治在城市领域成为可能：即服务于热动力学的计算机几何学和关系化城市建模；为建筑和城市形态服务的能源建模和改善性能措施；基于设计的生态学思想多元化和政治化。

最近的一些实践案例可能有助于说明日照性能这一领域的扩展。为同上文提到的研究模式对应，并考虑到城市在该历史议题中所起的作用与时间的非线性关系，这里选取了过去5年曼哈顿的3个案例。基于（常年）对采光的关注，在曼哈顿新一轮高层项目的背景下，人们对由SHoP、Vinoly和其他顶级建筑师设计的新超高层住宅楼产生了广泛担忧。市政艺术协会（Municipal Arts Society, MAS）已经恢复了其历史角色，为解决这些问题提供支持，并且最近还发布了一个在线工具来帮助说明问题的严峻性。

最近，各界展开关于纽约超高层住宅及其在中央公园的阴影的讨论，这表明日照性能这一话题的紧迫性。2013年12月，《纽约时报》发表了一篇文章，描述了由于新住宅开发而陷入永久阴影的曼哈顿公寓[9]。该文章描述了曼哈顿中城的超高层、超薄型住宅楼以及住宅项目的发展趋势和整个城市的庞大开发数量。《泰晤士报》和其他媒体认为这些住宅项目长期在住区视阈、游乐场和公园以及中央公园里投下阴影。《泰晤士报》的文章历数了过去一个世纪以来，围绕纽约的高层建筑、密度和采光的一系列长期焦虑[10]。纽约的市政艺术协会曾经反对1987年的Moshe Safdie哥伦布圆环项目在纽约进行，通过2013年12月发表的报告《偶然的天际线》（“Accidental skyline”）和一个交互式地图工具使人们重新关注该话题。该工具描述了高层建筑所带来的迫在眉睫的威胁，及对其隐蔽整个公园的担忧[11]。同月，康奈尔大学获得了规划许可，可以开始在罗斯福岛新技术园区建造一座巨大的零能耗建筑，将由大量位于屋顶的太阳能电池板提供发电服务。彭博中心（Bloomberg Center）由Thom Mayne/Morphosis设计，通过增加用于太阳能收集的建筑表面积，大幅度优化能源目标[12]。在Morphosis设计的彭博中心，对建造零能耗建筑的追求促使他设计了巨大的屋顶景观，以优化生产和减少排放，但同样也增加了建筑物的阴影投射面，使新园区中心建筑的大部分区域陷入黑暗。最近，珍妮·甘/甘建筑工作室（Jeanne Gang/Studio Gang Architects）在曼哈顿下西区第十大道40号的高线附近设计了一个日照雕刻塔。该项目通过向城市提出请愿，获得许可将部分开发量转移，从而避免在高线上方蒙上阴影。在这种情况下，下方高架生态长廊的采光需求促使甘采用雕刻的形态语言并考虑重新分配场地上的可用开发权。与Mayne对能源生产的关注相反，甘的塔扭曲自身，以避免在下方的公园投下阴影。该项目有效地颠覆了1916年《纽约州分区决议》（New York Zoning Resolution）中约定的逻辑[13]。最近，有关让·努维尔（Jean Nouvel）的努维尔建筑事务所（Jean Nouvel/Nouvel Architects）设计的位于西57大街的MoMA塔楼的争论也同样印证了新的阳光都市主义经济学：尽管设计方案关注了1916年及以后的分区法令，塔的高度和退线也限制在304.8 m（1 000英尺）之内，但Nouvel提议的塔仍然受到纽约市规划总监Amanda Burden的严厉抵制[14]。3个看似矛盾的案例表明，日照朝向和城市形态这一话题在当代文化中重新获得了契合度。该主题衍生出一系列问题，涉及社会正义以及城市的日照和空气权，还衍生出城市生活相关的可再生能源生产和消费这些同样引人深思的问题。这项研究将建立一套关于该主题与当代实践和政策的潜在相关性的知识体系。

全球许多项目，包括上述的近期项目在内，促成了日照性能相关的、复杂且矛盾的新经济学（更不用说新的政治）术语。2016年 9月，哈佛大学设计研究生院城市化办公室在成立大会上重回城市秩序相关的这一古老议题[15]。会议通过3种话语框架探索了“新的”阳光都市主义城市项目的潜力：插件（plugins）、公众资源（commons）和零和（zero-sum）。

拉尔夫·诺尔斯的“日照包络体”概念提出了一种设计工具，该工具预示了当代对设计参数化和关系化建模的兴趣。包络体提供了一种预测形态，从而将城市形态与日照性能相互关联。过去10年的技术发展带来了意想不到的精确度和反馈程度，也许能为这一有着半个世纪历史的创意注入新的可能。“插件”从概念及预测角度出发，重新审视了当代计算机几何模型对该设计模式所带来的变革。不受位置或纬度限制，在许多文化中，晒太阳被认为是一项古老而不可侵犯的权利。当前有几种政治经济概念出于健康考虑对其进行保护，另一些则出于能源方面的考虑对其进行监管。尽管上述2个概念有别，“公众资源”都将2种类型的太阳能获取重新定义为社会公平问题，继而考察了来源于资本积累的建筑形态与基于环境共识的采光需求之间的矛盾关系。20世纪70年代的能源危机和经济冲击引发了建筑和城市主义的一系列实验性的、反文化的实践。这些实践使得在新的太阳能政治经济中，日常应用和自我研发的出现成为可能。当前的环境危机包括零碳应对策略和将操作规模推向新自由主义的公司行动以及政府城市化进程。“零和”策略审查了从国家到城市、从个人到大集团（政治或经济）、从替代到新常态的转变。总体而言，这3个设计研究空间为城市形状设计框定了“新的”阳光都市主义的潜力。

图片来源：

文中图片由哈佛大学设计研究生院城市化办公室提供。

（编辑/王亚莺）

Towards a“New” Heliomorphism

Contemporary discussions of the status of the city in design culture tend to bend towards one of two self-referential and ultimately irreconcilable logical loops. On the one hand, many discussions of the contemporary city in relation to design devolve into an obsessive preoccupation with the social and political abstractions of policy, participation, and governance. On the other hand, it is equally common for these discussions to be delimited to the description of individual sites, projects, and protagonists as singularities in the history of the city. In between these two scopes and scales of urban agenda, we seem to have lost the potential for describing the design of the city as a collective cultural project. This broad statement clearly oversimplifies the situation, and runs the real risk of overstating the case. Yet, it remains true that in the vast majority of cases the discourse and practices of design associated with the contemporary city trend towards the scales, sites, and subjects associated with either policy on the one hand or individual development projects on the other.

It has become commonplace to situate a critique of an urban proposal in the broader failings associated with a lack of political leadership, an absence of robust regulatory mechanisms, or ineffectual public participation(… if only we had the right mayor, an enlightened governance model, progressive tax incentives, a better educated public, etc.). It has become equally commonplace to locate this critique in relation to the specifics associated with a single parcel of land, individual development interest, or singular architect’s identity(… a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity, unlocking a singular urban site, the Olympics are coming, the world’s most famous architect is attached, etc.). While there remain perfectly reasonable and necessary dimensions to both of these scales of critique, what is most often absent in contemporary design discourse on the city seems to be the capacity to articulate interests or values beyond the singular project, operating at the scale of collective urban form of some dimension, yet not at the scale of the city itself. In short, we seem to have withdrawn from the sites and scales at which urban form manifests itself in collective and cultural terms.

There are many well-founded historical reasons beyond this atrophy of urban propositions. In both instances, we witness a retreat into alibis and explanations associated with the lack of a larger political economy or those specific to the self-interests of those directly and immediately invested in the project in material terms. Surely much of this stems from the relative autonomy of realms enjoyed by urban planning and architecture since their professionalization in the academy post-1968. Equally, much of this stems from our broader political economy and civil discourse in which the potential for collective consideration of shared interests and mutually beneficial outcomes seems harder and harder to come by. In the wake of planning’s radicalization around the social, and architecture’s radicalization around autonomy, who speaks for the city as a cultural aspiration? Who is capable of articulating the potential of collective urban forms? In this context, the design disciplines broadly, and the urban arts specifically, share the potential to redress this historic formation through the development of discursive forms and projective potentials.

In this discourse on the status of the city as subject and object of design, one potential subject for a rapprochement between the polity and the project might be found in the relationship between solar orientation and urbanism. While this admittedly ancient topic has been available since the earliest regulations on building in the city, it is, once again, a timely question for the design disciplines. This is particularly true as the topic promises to bolster contemporary interest in the relations between ecology and urbanism. While much of the discourse and many practices of ecological urbanism have focused on the adaptation of urban form for contemporary hydrological and ecological conditions, the prospect of heliomorphism affords a new set of relationships between ecological function and urban form. As such, the topic promises to extend contemporary interest in a range of subjects from landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism through thermodynamics and urban metabolism. Rather than a technical question associated with any one specific design discipline, heliomorphism proposes a return to the design of the city as a collective and cultural act. Instead of making a false choice between architecture’s cultural autonomy and more interested engagements in ecological parameters in urban form, heliomorphism affords a third term. In this regard, the heliomorphic“turn” shares much with the topic of thermodynamics as an agenda for mobilizing architecture’s autonomous cultural production through drivers found in the externalities of climate and carbon, energy and environment.

The twin topics of landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism have focused much attention on the terrestrial topics of hydrologic networks and their ecological performance in relation to urban form. While these preoccupations remain central for many, the topic of“heliomorphism” proposes a new line of inquiry through which an“ecological urbanism” might be conceived.

The perennial topic of urban form and its relationship to solar orientation is an ancient one. The earliest texts on architecture and town planning invoke the importance of considering the orientation, layout, and correspondence of the shape of the city to its relationship to the sun. Various versions of ancient laws regarding the“right-to-light” as a fundamental social construct can be found in cultures around the world, irrespective of latitude. Over the past century, this topic was inscribed in a long-standing tension between the right to light as a social contract versus various forms of capital accumulation through urbanization.

Some of the earliest English-language regulations on limits to building were developed in response to this tension between solar access as a human right and the impact of tall buildings in the city. Many protagonists of modern planning proposed projects in which minimum equitable conditions for solar access across time were built into the shape of the modern city through limits to building height, setbacks, and orientations. Some of the most enduring and powerful images of twentieth-century urbanization stem from the extreme conditions of delirious vertical accumulation versus more socially equitable horizontality. British common-law conceptions of a“right-to-light” shaped the earliest Anglo forms of planning; among other precedents, these ideas informed the formation of the earliest planning regulations in the United States.New York’s Zoning Ordinance(1916) is one example of this cultural inheritance in which the social contract on the right to solar access was codified in canonical urban form. This form of collective social contract is also inscribed in our images of the city as cultural form. Hugh Ferris’sTheMetropolis of Tomorrow(1929) delineated the cultural ambition of the city as informed by a collective sense of social equity around solar access.

A contemporary return to heliotropism recommends a rereading of the history of the topic in twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. A number of notable architects and urbanists explored various aspects of the heliomorphic project over the second half of the twentieth century. This would include a reexamination of German planner Ludwig Hilberseimer’sNew Regional Pattern(1949)[1]. Hilberseimer’s post-war planning was equally informed by a profound sense of social solar equity in relation to the dominant spatial fix of the decentralized industrial economy. The topic recommends a reconsideration of how concepts of solar orientation informed the work of British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry in their twoTropical Architecturebooks(1956, 1964) as well as their republication ofArchitecture and the Environment(1976)[2-4]. The work of American architect Ralph Knowles and his concept of the“solar envelope” as described inSun Rhythm Form(1982)[5-6]is essential to the rereading of heliotropism. Knowles developed his conception of the“solar envelope” in response to the energy shocks and economic transformations of the 1970s. This reconsideration of the second half of the twentieth century for antecedents to a“new” heliotropism would be further reinforced by a rereading of contemporaneous theories, including, among others, Reyner Banham’sArchitecture of the Well-Tempered Environment(1969)[7]. These historical cases will be leavened by a reading of more recent commitments to digital paradigms for urbanism and the potentials of relational urban modeling of urban form in relation to solar performance.

In his 1988 publicationDesign for Northern Climates,Canadian urbanist Vladimir Matus referred to the design of“heliomorphic urban spaces.” In his formulation, Matus suggested the potential for a biologically informed urban project: “For decades the optimal milieu for a variety of human activities has been achieved mainly through energy input. ... (Now) a building can be transformed into a quasi-biological system that sensitively responds to environmental variations, opening itself like a blossom, harnessing and absorbing ambient energies.”[8]

These examples, and countless others, rehearsed a central tension in the regulation of urban form, pitting capital accumulation through the aggregation of built form against social equity around the right to a minimum standard of solar access. This longstanding tension between vertical accumulation and horizontal regulation has defined the topic of urban form and solar orientation for much of the modern era. More recently, however, architects and urbanists have articulated the potential of a new range of solar economies. Many of these projects propose to transcend longstanding tensions between capital accumulation and equitable access through an expanded field of solar performance, architectonic expression, and urban form. The prospect of a“new” heliomorphic agenda suggests the interrelated articulation of a pair of distinct tensions, each of them endemic to the design of the city. First among these is the longstanding anxiety between the city as a site for social equity versus the city as an engine for capital accumulation. Second is the more recent tension between solar access for ecological processes as opposed to the capture of solar access for renewable energy. Taken together, these terms offer a potential bio-politics of urban form in relation to social, economic, and ecological parameters for urban form. This expanded bio-political urban field is made possible by the intersection of three distinct modes of design research attendant to the heliomorphic agenda: computational geometry and relational urban modeling in service of thermodynamics; energy modeling and performative measures in the service of architectonic and urban form; and the pluralization and politicization of ecologies and ecological thinking through design.

Some examples from recent practice might be helpful to illustrate this expanded field of solar performance. For the sake of symmetry, and given the disproportionate role that the city has played in the history of the topic, three cases are drawn from Manhattan in the past five years. In the context of(perennial) concern over the access to sunlight and the most recent round of tall buildings in Manhattan, there has been a great deal of collective anxiety about new super-tall residential towers designed by leading architects such as SHoP, Vinoly, and others. The Municipal Arts Society(MAS) has returned to its historic role as the venue to convene these concerns, and it has recently published an online tool to help illustrate the dimension of the problem.

Recent debates over the impact of supertall residential buildings in New York and their shadows across Central Park suggest that this is a timely question. In December 2013,TheNew York Timespublished an article describing Manhattan apartments plunged into perpetual shadow by new residential development[9]. The article described the tendency toward super-tall, super-skinny residential towers in midtown Manhattan, as well as residential projects of enormous overall volume across the city. These projects were described in theTimesand other media accounts as casting shadows across longstanding residential viewsheds, across playgrounds and parks, and into Central Park itself. TheTimesarticle rehearsed a set of longstanding anxieties around tall buildings, density, and access to sunlight in New York that have persisted over the past century[10]. The MAS of New York, which led the opposition to Moshe Safdie’s Columbus Circle project in 1987, returned to the topic with its December 2013Accidental Skylinereport and an interactive mapping tool which describes the looming threat of tall buildings casting shadows across the park[11]. That same month, Cornell University received planning permission to begin construction of an enormous net-zero building on its new Roosevelt Island technology campus to be served by enormous arrays of rooftop solar panels. Designed by Thom Mayne/Morphosis, the Bloomberg Center achieved aggressive energy targets by increasing the surface area of the building dedicated to the collection of solar energy[12]. In Morphosis’s Bloomberg Center, the provocation of a net-zero-energy building prompted the development of an enormous roofscape attuned to optimizing production and mitigating emissions. In so doing, it also increased the shadows the building casts, and plunged much of the center of the new campus into darkness. More recently, Jeanne Gang/Studio Gang Architects have proposed a Solar Carve Tower adjacent to the High Line at 40 Tenth Avenue on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. This project successfully petitioned the city for a variance to allow a transfer of allowable development volume in order to not cast shadow over the High Line. In this case, the desire for solar access to the ecological function of the elevated promenade below prompted Gang to carve and redistribute available development rights on the site. In contrast to Mayne’s concern for energy production, Gang’s tower contorts itself to avoid casting shadows on the public park below. This project effectively inverts the logic embedded in the

New York Zoning Resolutionof 1916[13]. Equally indicative of the new economy of heliomorphism was the recent debate around Jean Nouvel/Nouvel Architects’ West 57th Street MoMA Tower. In spite of its attentiveness to the 1916 (and subsequent) zoning ordinances shaping the height and setback of towers up to 304.8 m(1,000 feet), Nouvel’s proposed tower was infamously and unceremoniously circumscribed by New York City planning director Amanda Burden[14]. The coincidence of these three seemingly contradictory impulses suggests that the topic of solar orientation and urban form has renewed relevance in contemporary culture. The subject raises a range of questions from social justice and the right to light and air in the city. It also raises equally compelling questions regarding renewable energy production and consumption in relation to urban life. This research will build a body of knowledge on the potential relevance of this topic for contemporary practice and policy.

These recent projects, and a range of others around the world, suggest the complex and contradictory terms of a new economy(not to say a new politics) of solar performance. The inaugural conference of the Harvard Graduate School of Design Office for Urbanization returned to this ancient aspect of urban order in September 2016[15]. The conference explored the potential for a“new” heliomorphic urban project through three discursive frames: plug-ins, commons, and zero-sum.

Ralph Knowles’s concept of the“solar envelope” proposed a design tool that anticipated contemporary interests in parametricism and relational modeling. The envelope offered a projective form through which urban morphology was indexed to solar performance. The technological developments of the last decade have enabled an unanticipated degree of precision and feedback, potentially infusing new possibilities into an idea that has a half-century of history. Plug-ins revisit the changes, conceptual and projective, that contemporary models of computational geometry have brought to this design model. Independent of location or latitude, access to the sun is considered an ancient and inviolable right in many cultures. Several current politico-economic conceptions, however, protect it for health considerations, while others regulate it for energy reasons. Regardless of these two distinctions, the commons reconsiders both types of solar access to be issues of social equity, and it examines, accordingly, the tensions that exist between built form through capital accumulation, on the one hand, and access to sunlight through environmental consensus, on the other. The energy crisis and economic shocks of the 1970s led to experimental and countercultural practices of architecture and urbanism. These practices enabled the emergence of domestic applications and DIY methods of implementation in a new political economy of solar energy. The current environmental crisis embraces zero-carbon responses and has pushed the scale of operation to neoliberal corporate and governmental urbanizations. Zero-sum reviews the shifts from the domestic to the urban, from the individual to the conglomerate(political or economical), from the alternative to the new normal. Taken collectively, these three spaces of design research afford the potential for a“new” heliomorphic agenda for the shape of the city.

Sources of Figures:

Provided by Courtesy Harvard GSD Office for Urbanization.