The Sun, ‘mother’ star of the solar system around which various bodies, including the Earth, revolve, whose fusion core produces energy and releases electromagnetic radiation, a flow of particles and neutrinos. In 2024, a surge of this radiation caused a storm capable of disrupting electrical grid transmissions on Earth.
Located in the Orion Arm, the Sun not only significantly influences the climate on Earth, but is also the protagonist of recurring cosmogonic visions – from the ancient Egyptians, to pre-Columbian civilizations, to Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun – that place it at the center of religious and political systems as a source of irradiation and emanation (of life, power, knowledge). Studied and venerated, it has inspired various architectural works and projects that dedicate spaces and territories to it, such as the megalithic monuments built with consideration to its position during the summer solstice, or the Temple of Kukulkan in Mexico, designed to project snake-shaped shadows during the equinoxes. This ancient tradition of observing the solstices continued, for example, with the land artwork Observatory created by Robert Morris in 1971 in Flevoland, as highlighted by Rosalind Krauss: ‘Morris had begun to think about the structures both made (like Stonehenge) and found (like caves) by prehistoric societies to convert the arc of the sun’s revolutions into the straight line of the intelligible, arrowlike trajectory, and thus to ‘read’ the solstices. Observatory (1971) is a massive project through which to think and to experience this culturally ancient notion of marking, which is to say, of entering into a text that one has not oneself written, and that will continue to be produced to the end of solar time’.
The shadow is a multi-scalar design tool on Earth: high buildings in megacities cast the Earth into its ‘physiological’ darkness; porticoes and small awnings provide salvific shelter from the burning heat. Solar eclipses are spectacles that prompt Earth’s inhabitants to change course, adopt a position, and await an event unfolding across intersecting spaces and vast distances, marking exceptions in the terrestrial calendar and reminding us of Earth’s lack of autonomy, highlighting its place within a larger system. Julia Kristeva emphasizes that the ‘black sun’ is a powerful inverse figure that outlines a semiotics of melancholy and depression, a ‘non-sense’ that, like a negative sun, is ‘evident, striking, inescapable’. In 1972, the film Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky was released, based on the 1961 novel of the same name by Polish writer Stanisław Lem. In an unspecified future, studies and expeditions are underway on an extrasolar planet named Solaris, which is covered by a mysterious, gelatinous ocean, sentient and alive. Encompassing science fiction, psychogeography, spaces of memory, and forms of the subconscious, Tarkovsky’s visual work stages a duel between two intelligences: the conscious, connective, and planning intelligence of the ocean and the unaware and frightened intelligence of the Earthlings.
In 2003, Olafur Eliasson built The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, a former thermoelectric power plant transformed into a museum by Herzog & de Meuron. A semicircular screen, a ceiling of mirrors, and artificial mist create the illusion of a sun trapped inside. Backlit by approximately two hundred lights, the semicircle and its reflection produce the image of an enormous indoor sunset. Photographs documenting this site-specific installation within the museum space show visitors mesmerised by the luminous presence, lying down to bask in the powerful artificial light, and gathering in circles to improvise new rituals.
The fame of the distant sun traces multiple and overlapping curves: a source of life, energy and crops, it is also a presence that illuminates deserts, like the American ones described by Reyner Banham, inviting us to take refuge in dense shadows and underground spaces. Omnipresent in the latest modernity as a protagonist to whom we leave space in design and in reality, on which we set orientations, on the basis of which we build rotating buildings, countless projects bear its name or sign such as, for example, the Solar Pavilion by the Smithsons or Villa Girasole by Angelo Invernizzi. The subject of constructions entirely dedicated to welcoming its energy, such as the Solar House by Oswald Mathias Ungers or Haus Regensburg by Thomas Herzorg, or design to avoid its irradiation because, as William Atkins writes in A World Without Borders, ‘You can come to dread the sun, even when shelter and water are at hand: its heat, but also its light. No sooner has it risen than I long for it to set’.
To the relationship between architecture and solar symbolism was devoted the first issue of the magazine ‘Psicon’, entitled Architettura e simbolismo solare and published in 1974, in which Marcello Fagiolo wrote the essay Magna Grecia. La psicologia della colonizzazione e il mito solare della regione (‘Magna Grecia. The Psychology of Colonisation and the Solar Myth of the Region’). Decades later, Philippe Rahm, in his book Histoire naturelle de l’architecture, insists on the links between climate and urban design. Rahm considers temperatures and humidity to be inevitable factors in architectural design, transforming technical data into elements of style and, simultaneously, characteristics of a renewed aesthetic.
In the past it was easy to find solid alliances between architecture and the Sun, such as in Montreuil, a village not far from Paris, where in the 17th century a carpet of crops was created in open-air rooms. The rooms’ 2.7-metre-high walls were designed to capture heat during the day and release it at night to prevent frost. In 1981, Peter Cook’s Solar City was an infinite machine traversing the territory and looking up at the sky.
As both a subject of relationships interpreted by constructions and an object producing energy to be captured through machines, the sun remains a source of life that is increasingly obscured in the imagination, due to the changes wrought by humans on a solarised and overheated planet. The dominance of the Sun, despite its indifference to what happens on Earth, produces a series of nostalgias. Cities have long suffered from ‘diurnism’, as the day artificially recreated to continue its course after sunset casts the light of memory on the night. The Book End of Time by Tacita Dean is a book crystallised by salt, a work that reverberates the story The Voices of Time by J.G. Ballard and that by presenting the end of time with a concrete, white, and illegible volume, evokes, by contrast, the melancholy of unlimited icy landscapes, and of territories and cities illuminated by the cold light of snow. As Nietzsche reminds us, at midday shadows disappear.
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