Images of the Sun on Earth

Ous Abou Ras

MArch

Advisor: Caitlin Mueller

Readers: Brandon Clifford & Mohamad Nahleh

We are solar societies, engaging in diverse relationships with the Sun across cultures and geographies. However, as we began to spend more time indoors in thermally controlled environments, we started grappling with rising energy demands and climate change. Gradually, our connection to the Sun’s energy shifted towards a utilitarian perspective with a paradoxical duality: both as a valuable source of energy to be maximized, and an accomplice in planetary warming to be minimized. Dealing with this conundrum, architecture has divided sunlight into two experiential components. The aesthetic qualities of light are reserved for its visual phenomenon, while its thermal characteristic is either portrayed as a renewable energy source to be utilized, or as a nuisance to be shaded from.

Rather than viewing our star’s energy as a utility, this thesis pushes forward the century-old physics theory of energy as mass. In 1905, Einstein demonstrated that an object’s mass is simply a measure of its energy content. As such, sunlight, as an electromagnetic wave, becomes the medium that carries the Sun’s weight. Converging the radiation back to the point from which it diverged offers a way to recreate the physical surface of the Sun on Earth with all its heat and mass.

Building off the architectural and landscape practices that engaged sunlight to design a diverse range of micro-climates, this thesis proposes a series of analogue machines that embed solar capturing techniques borrowed from scientific literature. These analogue machines redistribute the field of sunlight on Lafyette Square into a landscape of concentrated pockets of energy, creating hot – and perhaps even burning - surfaces to provide warm moments in an otherwise cold, empty park in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With recent advancements in computer graphics, a ray-tracing tool is developed to estimate the output energy for a solar collector across varying solar positions and visualize how different geometries concentrate direct and indirect radiation. By repurposing solar technologies to heat small volumes for short periods of time rather than heating an entire house for a prolonged time, this thesis re-imagines our relationship to the Sun’s energy – from utility to a thermal phenomenon – where we can feel the sun, even if for a moment, a cold cloudy day.