THE INSTRUMENTALIZED
STUDIO AND DESIGN SCIENCE

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

1/

The sun is fundamental to all life. It is the source of our vision, our warmth, and the rhythm of our lives. Its movements inform our perceptions of time and space and our scale in the universe. 1

1

Ralph Knowles, Sun Rhythm Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 3.

To the contemporary architect, the use of ecological parameters in generative design can feel almost inevitable, even tautological. Yet, in its early formulations, heliomorphism—the generation of form from solar or umbral position and parameters—was embedded in and inflected by the heuristic preoccupations of certain design researchers. During the 1960s and 1970s, drawing on radical geography, crystallography, war games, structuralist sociology, and the emerging concerns of ecology, Ralph Knowles developed a specific method and a laboratory that took on the project of reshaping the practice of the architect around the demands of solar access. Through his research, he brought together the technical and the natural to define a generative heliomorphism, which provided a foundational set of questions for a new scientific approach to design in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hyperboloid diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Hyperboloid diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Hyperboloid diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Hyperboloid diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Hyperboloid diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Hyperboloid diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Hyperboloid diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Hyperboloid diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

1/

Between 1967 and 1969, at the University of Southern California (USC), Knowles inaugurated an experiment in design methodology with far-reaching ambitions, a project to evaluate and systematize the formal and social impacts of solar access in architecture. Knowles saw design’s reliance on subjective translation of aesthetic ideals and its lack of methodological rigour as acute failures. Upon his arrival at USC in 1963, he quickly laid the foundation for a quantitative framework for performance-based computational formalism that gave rise to new, calculationally eroded urban megaforms. In the late 1960s, Knowles reconstituted the design studio as a laboratory and rethought the designer’s tools. The work of his Natural Forces Laboratory at USC combined physical simulation of ecological factors with proto-computational methods of territorial discretization and quantified performance to create a new vision of what a designer could do and be. Knowles reconceived the generative process of design around natural forces in a way that his predecessors did not. He sought to upend classical design techniques by ensuring that his teaching drew from direct experimental methods. Mechanical implements, such as various iterations of the solar-simulating heliodon, complemented novel conceptual and formal tools, such as the solar envelope. At the Natural Forces Laboratory, Knowles’s subject and his method, in equal measure, contributed to a new definition of design science.

TOWARD A DESIGN
LABORATORY

Diagram of form generation based on balanced summer and winter insolation, 1974

Diagram of form generation based on balanced summer and winter insolation, 1974

Base plan of balanced insolation model, 1974

Base plan of balanced insolation model, 1974

1/

It started, really, when I converted a design studio into a laboratory. What I was doing was viewed with suspicion; the head of the department thought it was absolute madness. The research was thought of as non-architectural, non-design. It was scarcely viewed with any sympathy… [The head of the architecture department] didn’t consider it a proper architectural pursuit. He saw it either as not architecture at all, or as a distraction from design—he didn’t see experimentation as a design tool. 2

2

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

There were various antecedents to Knowles’s transformation of the studio into an ecological laboratory, and in particular the concept of regulating urban form based on solar access drew on broad historical and contemporary references. Knowles was inspired by the cellular organization of the Pueblo peoples’ dwellings in what came to be the southwestern United States. He studied the form and overall structure of settlements such as Mesa Verde and particularly Pueblo Bonito, which made a hostile environment more livable through formal adaptations driven by solar and shadow access. 3 Less a collection of buildings than a formally reticulated megastructure, Pueblo Bonito, located in the Chaco Canyon of New Mexico, was constructed between the tenth and twelfth centuries. It was an extensive settlement of four- and five-floor structures in a semicircular arc around common areas for rituals and resource storage. The relationship to solar rhythm embedded in the pueblo is evident not only in energetic performance, but also in a kind of cosmic orientation of the plans and architectural details that tied cultural ritual and symbolic resonance to the solar-structured system. 4 Although Knowles had an outsider’s perspective on these settlements, they were powerful examples for him of urban structures that functioned integrally and holistically.

3

Knowles, 14.

4

Knowles, 17.

Knowles’s design research recalls legal precedents concerning sunlight, including the sixteenth-century Laws of the Indies issued by the Spanish Crown, Britain’s Ancient Lights Doctrine in the Prescription Act of 1832, and New York’s Zoning Resolution of 1916. 5 In London, the Ancient Lights Doctrine prevented legal disputes when new construction impinged upon the solar access of longstanding structures, defining access to sunlight as a fundamental right of owning established property. New York’s 1916 Zoning Law explicitly put forth formal guidelines for solar access, including a series of setbacks established according to block orientation and correlated building height and volume. However, the formal implications of the law were not fully understood until Hugh Ferriss illustrated a version of its logical extreme in his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow. Ferriss insisted that it was becoming “almost impossible to consider skyscrapers apart from their effect on their surroundings” 6 and that “we shall have to study, in our drawings, the more recent inclination to modify and vary this rising mass—exhibited in the movement to ‘step back’ the buildings… In all this, we will note the growing desire for light and air.” 7 Spain’s Laws of the Indies of 1573, particularly the “Royal Ordinances for the Laying Out of Cities,” proposed a thermally nuanced regime of narrower streets in hotter climates to facilitate shading, and wider streets in cool climates to maximize solar exposure. 8 The full spatial consequences of each of these legal precursors were implicit; they were not taken into account at the outset, but were uncovered following the implementation of the written policy. In contrast, Knowles considered sunlight and solar patterns not only as a means to define the form of an individual building, but also as parameters for choreographing the relationships between aggregated building forms.

5

Alex Lehnerer, Grand Urban Rules (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2014), 151, 146, 149.

6

Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Ives Washburn, 1929), 54.

7

Ferriss, 59.

8

Joe R. McBride, The World’s Urban Forests: History, Composition, Design, Function and Management (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 57.

Gunnar Pleijel. Globoscope photographs. Originally published in Gunnar Pleijel, The Computation of Natural Radiation in Architecture and Town Planning (Stockholm: Victor Pettersons Bokindustri Aktiebolag, 1954), 100

Gunnar Pleijel. Globoscope photographs. Originally published in Gunnar Pleijel, The Computation of Natural Radiation in Architecture and Town Planning (Stockholm: Victor Pettersons Bokindustri Aktiebolag, 1954), 100

Gunnar Pleijel. Globoscope, mock-up. Originally published in Gunnar Pleijel, The Computation of Natural Radiation in Architecture and Town Planning (Stockholm: Victor Pettersons Bokindustri Aktiebolag, 1954), 102

Gunnar Pleijel. Globoscope, mock-up. Originally published in Gunnar Pleijel, The Computation of Natural Radiation in Architecture and Town Planning (Stockholm: Victor Pettersons Bokindustri Aktiebolag, 1954), 102

The 1950s and 1960s were a fertile period for solar research in design. The geometry of solar access, specifically the geometric science of daylighting calculation and solar heating, was a research topic as early as the 1920s, and by 1950 it had become an interest of the popular architectural press. 9 Researchers such as Gunnar Pleijel elaborated new methods of imagining solar impact. 10 Pleijel’s novel photographic device, the globoscope, created panoramic stereographic projections with superimposed solar paths across the sky above a city. 11 The Olgyay brothers, at their Princeton Architectural Laboratory, carried out pioneering work on climatology and design, including some of the earliest solar-access studies using their custom-built thermoheliodon, 12 a device that modelled not only solar position but also wind direction and atmospheric humidity. 13 Victor Olgyay’s 1963 Design with Climate outlined how thermal design can determine the form of community and urban organizations. 14 Knowles acknowledged that photographs of the Olgyays’ laboratory were a catalyst for his own work. 15

9

In September 1950, Progressive Architecture documented methods of calculating shadows cast internally and shadows “of one building on another.” John Rannells, “Plotting the Sun,” Progressive Architecture (September 1950): 72–75.

10

Gunnar Pleijel, The Computation of Natural Radiation in Architecture and Town Planning (Stockholm: Victor Pettersons Bokindustri Aktiebolag, 1954).

11

James R. Jenness, “The Globoscope,” Solar Energy 19, no. 4 (1977): 361–363.

12

Daniel Barber, “The Thermoheliodon: Climatic Architecture at the End of Calculation,” ARPA Journal 1 (May 2014), http://www.arpajournal.net/thermoheliodon/.

13

Victor Olgyay, “Report on the Thermoheliodon: Laboratory Machine for Testing Thermal Behavior of Buildings through Model Structures,” submitted to the National Science Foundation, June 1956.

14

Victor Olgyay, Design with Climate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 10.

15

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

Aladar and Victor Olgyay. Thermoheliodon with instrumentation panel. Originally published in Victor Olgyay, “Report on the Thermoheliodon: Laboratory Machine for Testing Thermal Behavior of Buildings through Model Structures,” submitted to the National Science Foundation, June 1956. © Princeton University, School of Architecture

Aladar and Victor Olgyay. Thermoheliodon with instrumentation panel. Originally published in Victor Olgyay, “Report on the Thermoheliodon: Laboratory Machine for Testing Thermal Behavior of Buildings through Model Structures,” submitted to the National Science Foundation, June 1956. © Princeton University, School of Architecture

What distinguished Knowles’s work from that of his predecessors was, first, the synthesis of a regulatory and generative approach, second, the projective detail of geometric construction, and, third, the definition of the sun as chief among the environmental forces that impact design in both process and result. Knowles mapped the interactions of pairs or sets of environmental forces, including sun, wind, water, and gravity. He included the behaviour of social groups in the set of environmental forces that influenced design, to the extent that this behaviour could be naturalized and systematically represented. A natural process might be analytically isolated with the goal of interrogating and rationalizing its specific behaviour, but the search for a kind of nonstandard dynamic equilibrium between these forces was Knowles’s true ambition.

A PEDAGOGICAL PROTOTYPE

Buckminster Fuller with students from North Carolina State University, including Ralph Knowles, ca. 1949. Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries

Buckminster Fuller with students from North Carolina State University, including Ralph Knowles, ca. 1949. Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries

North Carolina State was an experimental school. People like Buckminster Fuller and Lewis Mumford spent a lot of time there… There were so many good minds in their prime, whether visiting or full time. You had mental indigestion all the time—it was just a fantastic place to be!

I spent two semesters with Bucky working on the dome… His primary message had to do with how the world’s resources should be used. His frame of reference was always resource allocation, always in global terms, and always unlimited by space. In some ways, he dealt with an unreal constructional world. His ideas were all new to me. I absorbed them with a kind of vicious hunger. When I got to the fifth year, Eduardo Catalano had joined the school. He was also operating in an entirely different kind of design world, focused on experiments in non-traditional building forms. He believed in research—he saw testing and research as valid approaches to design. We did things like wind-tunnel tests and investigated solar responses in buildings. All of it was new to me, because the idea of an architect doing research seemed almost unthinkable in those days; an architect designed buildings, and that was all. To indulge in research and the effects of natural forces on buildings was unacceptable, but those things took hold anyway. Both Bucky’s interest in resource allocation at a world scale and Catalano’s interest in research as a design method had a profound effect on me. 16

16

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

Knowles’s thematic interest in the notion of a design laboratory grew, in part, from his experience with Eduardo Catalano and Buckminster Fuller, both of whom promoted distinct ideas of experimentally driven design laboratories. Knowles graduated from North Carolina State University in 1954 and worked with Fuller on his iconic paperboard housing for the United States Marine Corps. Knowles later moved to Boston to work in Catalano’s office, and completed a master of architecture degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1957, around the time that Catalano was carrying out his research on anticlastic wood structures. The pedagogical approaches that Knowles experienced during his studies led him to develop an affinity for experimentation; they proved to him that design processes and scientific methods were not mutually exclusive but rather mutually beneficial, and his conviction informed the organization of the Natural Forces Laboratory. Over time, Knowles’s architecture-as-research approach led him to develop an interest in generative processes, namely form finding through the close observation of natural forces.

My thesis [at MIT] was a structural research project with Stanley Steinberg, an ex-paratrooper who was trained as an engineer. From there, I got a job teaching at Auburn University, which gave me a chance to look at the studio as a platform for research. I received grants from the Container Corporation of America, which also gave me tons and tons of cardboard. [This same company funded Buckminster Fuller’s work on cardboard domes.] We used cardboard as a structural material, as a forming material for concrete, and tried to find other applications.

After three years at Auburn, I received a grant from the Graham Foundation, and I undertook a series of studies of building forms in response to natural forces. It was a real revelation, the idea that generating building responses to natural forces would produce a unique aesthetic—a form that I had never seen before. That particular study was not considered with the goal of generating form, but rather of understanding surface responses to sun, wind, and water. These shapes, made from surface adaptations, had an extraordinary beauty all their own. That revelation was the beginning of a different sort of attitude about buildings and building configurations. I think it started a fundamentally different attitude about what beauty is in buildings, derived from direct, logical responses to natural forces.

From there I came out to the University of Southern California [in 1963]. I was put in charge of the design program for a time. We converted our conventional studio into a testing laboratory—the Natural Forces Laboratory. That was a whole new attitude toward design education—the design studio became a mechanism for research. 17

17

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

Ralph Knowles and a student observing a wind-tunnel test, 1967

Ralph Knowles and a student observing a wind-tunnel test, 1967

In coordination with colleagues Pierre Koenig and Emmet Wemple, Knowles effectively transformed the third-year architecture studio at USC into a laboratory with custom machines for experiments with lighting, wind, and water dynamics. Observed reactions of experimental systems to simulated forces—the particular tendencies of fluid systems to scour or particle systems to shift and erode, for example—were directly translated into contextual organization schemes. In the environment of a studio-turned-laboratory, Knowles and his colleagues developed systematic responses to natural forces as generative design methods. Several USC faculty who were not involved in the program but who were sympathetic to its direction, such as Peter Jon Pearce and Konrad Wachsmann, reinforced the scientific subculture at the school.

Wind form produced following a sand erosion test, 1967

Wind form produced following a sand erosion test, 1967

Wind form produced following a sand erosion test, 1967

Wind form produced following a sand erosion test, 1967

Wind form produced following a sand erosion test, 1967

Wind form produced following a sand erosion test, 1967

1/

In the Natural Forces Laboratory, the technocratic and the natural formed an uneasy alliance, as deductive planning techniques were synthesized with environmental systems that are frustratingly dynamic or even chaotic. The laboratory was defined in three phases. First, Knowles acquired sophisticated experimental equipment that had previously been unfamiliar in an architecture studio. Second, he introduced large-scale, discretized geographic methods of planning to quantify how dynamic natural systems would interact with more deliberate design interventions. He created eroded voxelizations to propose urban megastructures moulded to optimal solar performance. Finally, he articulated a system of projective frustums that define oblique roof conditions in order to maximize solar exposure while minimizing occlusion—this is the solar envelope.

INSTRUMENTATION AND THE
FURNISHING OF DESIGN
RESEARCH

A student measuring a cast of erosion modelling results, 1967

A student measuring a cast of erosion modelling results, 1967

Ralph Knowles and students with a heliodon used to develop the solar envelope, 1980

Ralph Knowles and students with a heliodon used to develop the solar envelope, 1980

Enclosed heliodons in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Enclosed heliodons in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Heliodons and students in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Heliodons and students in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

1/

We did all this in the same studio space—the students wandered around and saw what was happening in all three of the studios. Some students resented it; they saw architectural training in a totally different way and weren’t ready for it. Other students loved and embraced the approach in the laboratory… Erosion seemed like a good thing to study, since Los Angeles was growing into the hillsides—there were developers all over the city cutting the hills up in dangerous ways, so we wanted to look for a formal response. We did these tests outside, because they were so big and so messy—running water over all kinds of soil at different slopes to see what happens. Since the erosion tests would take hours or even days, they drew attention from all across the campus. The tests were public, and so were useful for engaging and involving people—it was fantastic! Students from engineering and earth sciences were just fascinated. The kids would spend days and nights just watching the erosion tests. Some of the tests took so long that seeds hidden in the soil began to sprout. Questions about the evolution of life arose from these erosion tests, from the extended periods of close observation. During one of the tests, I remember someone saying, “I fully expect dinosaurs to emerge from the soil!” 18

18

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

In keeping with its broad ambition to understand the implications of natural processes, the Natural Forces Laboratory had three areas of focus, each directed by a different faculty member. Knowles himself directed the solar studies. Pierre Koenig, well known for his case study houses, led the wind studies. Emmet Wemple, a landscape architect, led the water studies, which included large-scale erosion tests. The work of these three sections was organized into three studios.

Water form produced during an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Water form produced during an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Water form produced during an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Water form produced during an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Water-form erosion test in progress in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Water-form erosion test in progress in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Water form produced during an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Water form produced during an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Cast model of a water form produced following an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Cast model of a water form produced following an erosion test in the Natural Forces Laboratory, 1967

Topography model of a water form, 1967

Topography model of a water form, 1967

1/

Although Knowles had a close team of collaborators, the intellectual climate surrounding the laboratory was somewhat less hospitable. Knowles worked outside the university’s institutional structure to obtain funding, and he secured a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Instrumentation was key to Knowles’s agenda for the new design laboratory. Knowles and his team constructed a range of specialized machines intended to gauge solar access, test wind erosion, and simulate fluvial evolution. Some of these instruments were modifications of existing machines, while others were new devices. But whether adapted or entirely bespoke, the tools facilitated the new model of design science that the laboratory was developing.

A student working inside his enclosed heliodon, 1967

A student working inside his enclosed heliodon, 1967

Ralph Knowles and a heliodon, ca. 1970

Ralph Knowles and a heliodon, ca. 1970

The heliodon was one of the most important instruments constructed for the Natural Forces Laboratory. A heliodon is a multi-axis platform that allows for the free but measured orientation of a light source relative to a ground plane or, by extension, a building model. The most common heliodons included independent axis control for both solar azimuth and solar altitude, with the occasional addition of platform controls for the orientation or declination of the modelled ground plane. Artificial light sources, or the sun itself, could be used to evaluate models. Although the concept of the heliodon as a testing apparatus dates from the early twentieth century, the construction of novel heliodon geometries was something of a cottage industry in the late 1960s. Heliodons were used to evaluate shading devices, interior sunlight, and solar access. At the Natural Forces Laboratory, each student designed and fabricated a heliodon as preparation for Knowles’s solar studio. This resulted in a wide array of strategies and mechanisms being tested, and shaped the experimental environment of the studio. One of the larger heliodons used in the laboratory was built by a group of students under Knowles’s direction in 1965, prior to the laboratory’s official founding. 19 It consisted of two semi-circular aluminium tracks of different sizes, attached perpendicularly to each other, with each controlled by a direct-current motor. The motors allowed for calibrated adjustment of the position of a lamp representing the sun, which was attached to the smaller semi-circular track. This heliodon was used over the course of the next several years in each of Knowles’s design studios, all of which focused on the specific adaptation of built form to sunlight at varying scales and densities. The heliodon was later integrated into the architecture department more broadly by Pierre Koenig, and it remained there for four decades.

19

Xing Chen, “Computerization of Ralph Knowles Heliodon” (Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 2008).

Solar positioning was one of several spatial orientation problems researched and taught at USC during this period. The laboratory’s investigation of solar positioning paralleled Konrad Wachsmann’s universal positioner, or as Knowles called it, a “universal motion machine.” The positioner was a multi-axis frame meant to automate the orientation and construction of complex forms that resulted from Wachsmann’s highly adaptive prefabricated joint system. The articulated and quasi-robotic armatures of Knowles’s heliodon and Wachsmann’s universal positioner are strikingly similar—both consist of a series of compound radial-arc tracks. Kinematically, they are the same device. One is a tool for analyzing, and the other for assembling. Together, they point to the emergence of a mechanical but proto-computational method for design research in the late 1960s.

Konrad Wachsmann. Universal positioner, with a variety of structures that it was meant to help assemble, ca. 1969. Akademie der Künste

Konrad Wachsmann. Universal positioner, with a variety of structures that it was meant to help assemble, ca. 1969. Akademie der Künste

With these heliodons and other experimental machines, the architecture studio was transformed into a laboratory dense with instrumentation. Ultimately, this instrumentation extended beyond physical simulation to digital experiments. Beginning in 1968, Knowles developed computational parameterizations of surface-to-volume ratios in his studies of urban aggregations carried out in Owens Valley, in eastern California. He built a parametric digital model of his solar envelope concept in the mid-1970s—a kind of digital heliodon. Knowles also used the computer to simulate wind processes. Digital geometric tools supplemented the more tactile physical experimentation, which Knowles continued to find essential.

Solar envelope viewed according to the sun’s position. First published in Sun Rhythm Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981)

Solar envelope viewed according to the sun’s position. First published in Sun Rhythm Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981)

Solar envelope construction diagrams. First published in Sun Rhythm Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981)

Solar envelope construction diagrams. First published in Sun Rhythm Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981)

THE HORIZON OF THE SOLAR
ENVELOPE

Multi-block solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

Multi-block solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

Multi-block solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

Multi-block solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

1/

Row-housing solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

Row-housing solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

Row-housing solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

Row-housing solar envelope massing model, ca. 1990

1/

Is it scientific, or is it design? I saw the laboratory as a testing of an idea, of a theory. We tested the solar envelope over a period of years. That testing was a scientific process. We were testing a hypothesis that the solar envelope would not overly constrain either development or design… We tested the extent to which the envelope liberated the designer by making light and heat accessible… We tested the hypothesis in the design studio, not in the laboratory. The work in the laboratory was about the exploration of the impact of nature on form, but the testing of the solar envelope—how it might work, and the impacts it might have—was done in the architecture design studio. The more scientific research did not interfere with studio projects, but supported them. If you’re going to make a distinction between design and science…the earlier experiments in eroded solar forms were science. We considered the extent to which that kind of form could be useful as a megastructure, with certain urban implications. Moshe Safdie was interested. It was not a result of solar access—it was a pure shape generated from an objective. 20

20

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

The work of the Natural Forces Laboratory encompassed a range of conceptual techniques, but perhaps none was more succinct, powerful, and enduring than the solar envelope. Something between scientific method and design technique, the solar envelope, according to Knowles, is “a container to regulate development within limits derived from the sun’s relative motion” — a volumetric description of the bounds to which one can build without casting a predefined amount of shadow on adjacent buildings or properties. 21 It is a heuristic procedure applied not only to specific buildings, but also, and more fundamentally, to networks of buildings in urban systems to determine a collection of mutually beneficial geometric constraints. Although it was originally conceived as a very spatial kind of zoning structure, the solar envelope also had provocative implications for design process. It adapts the limits of form to daily and seasonal rhythms. It preserves basic access to light and surveys the fundamental association of possible building mass to a full range of solar conditions. Going far beyond answering questions of light reaching a window, the solar envelope interrogates the infinite range of possible forms that a building might have.

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Cubic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Cubic diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Cubic diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 1963

Cubic diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 196

Cubic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Cubic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of structural forces, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Tetrahedron diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

1/

The solar envelope grew, in part, from Knowles’s fascination with the imageization of the environmental contingency of buildings — of volumetrically graphing their optimal form. Drawing on Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City, Knowles lamented the lack of legibility or “imageability” in contemporary American cities. 22 He attributed this to the unintentional elimination of solar temporal rhythms: “Our buildings no longer responded architecturally to real time. They could mechanically peak-load off-site energy sources and be independent from the older adaptations of location and form. Because designers depended almost exclusively on mechanical rather than architectural support systems, time became nonimageable.” 23 The solar envelope is Knowles’s proposal to imageize time by creating a collective method of volumetrically zoning cities according to geographically specific parameters: “a collective urban form response to natural forces as the basis for imageability.” 24

21

Knowles, 7.

22

Knowles, 18.

23

Knowles, 18.

24

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

Prismatic diagrammatic study model of solar-gravitational force, 1963

1/

The human right to sunlight in urban environments was the fundamental premise of the development of the solar envelope: “To use the sun, you must have access to it. To have access, there must be a public recognition of the right of access — a solar policy”. 25 For Knowles, the solar envelope was a deeply ethical project, associated not only with questions of equity and quality of life in urban environments, but also with the inevitable society-wide transition from nonrenewable and limited fuel sources to renewables, solar energy being chief among these. 26 It is a positivist ideal, but one that acknowledges that any shift that would take place would have to happen under familiar zoning laws and satisfy relevant capital pressures.

25

Knowles, 263.

26

Knowles, 297.

Knowles describes the solar envelope in detail in his book Sun Rhythm Form, which is in part a step-by-step guide to generating the envelope’s complex geometric constructions. He enlists descriptive geometries and precise operations to explicate the method, with “each plane systematically located and shaped in accordance with solar azimuth and altitude angles between cutoff times.” He developed a series of drawings that describe “a systematic definition of the envelope’s volumetric boundaries,” unique to any latitude and corresponding solar conditions. 27 He also offers a series of case studies that demonstrate the method under varying urban constraints. The result is a new collective formal calculus, with exceptionally legible design decision making and structural variability. 28

27

Knowles, 79.

28

Knowles, 179–280.

Model of linear generators of balanced insolation form, 1974

Model of linear generators of balanced insolation form, 1974

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

1/

A CRYSTALLINE ECOLOGY

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

View of large-scale balanced insolation model, 1974

1/

[The aim was] not to design a building as a static object, but almost as a living system, a dynamic system, a system that recognizes that the environment is impinging on the building in a dynamic way, so that the building’s response should be dynamic. That’s one of the things that needs to happen, and it needs to happen within the schools; we need to train architects to think that way. 29

29

Ralph Knowles, interviewed by the authors, 2017.

Within the broader context of the Natural Forces Laboratory, Knowles’s more focused solar speculations had a basis in the geometry of both geographic land and architectural space. The geographic dimension played a primary role in conceptual development. Before considering the envelope of specific buildings, Knowles looked to larger-scale megastructural city aggregations, which harboured the promise of an ecologically tuned and self-sufficient urbanism. He took the arid and sun-baked Owens Valley as the stage for this research, and proposed an empirical methodology for ecological community planning based on solar orientation in correlation with other environmental factors, such as topography, geology, temperature, wind, water, and vegetation. 30 The Owens Valley project informed Knowles’s research at the Natural Forces Laboratory on performance-based form and the spatial qualities of an ecologically robust city.

30

Knowles, 50.

Over the course of the Owens Valley project, Knowles made a connection between environmental risk and the resilience of formal organizations. 31 He developed these relationships through a series of interrelated gridded maps. A first map divided the land area of interest into discrete cells, with each cell having specific values for known site conditions. A series of additional, correlated maps added discretized values for diversity, potential, and other factors, taking the boundary conditions of the site into account. These overlapping maps were then coordinated and analyzed to generate building densities and specifications for future development. 32 The maps were often used to derive characteristic networks that could help determine how the site would behave in concert with the complex of overlapping natural and social forces.

31

Knowles, 68.

32

Knowles, 104.

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

View of small-scale incremented insolation model, 1974

1/

These maps and networks allowed Knowles to generate “optimized” arrangements of built form and to project growth from empirical and ecological network analysis. 33 But the goal was not only optimization; Knowles also had an interest in developing a diversity of spaces. Such speculation should “develop not the greatest number of parts, but the greatest distinction among parts, the highest degree of diversity, and the greatest probability of associations among adjacent parts…with common regard for land resources and for the need not just to increase individual choice, but to provide a basis for that choice.” 34 Knowles explained his method as offering “control over the critical adaptive mechanisms—size of building as a function of location, complexity as a function of form, and sequence as a function of metabolism.” 35 In 1974’s Energy and Form, Knowles expanded these maps to make megastructural lattices, reminiscent of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s “diagram of forces,” and akin to the egg-crate structures Knowles built while working with Buckminster Fuller. 36 The lattices also recall the voxelized and crystalline structures of Knowles’s USC colleague Peter Jon Pearce, as well as the much earlier crystal models of molecular structures developed in the nineteenth century by mineralogists such as René-Just Haüy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, architects such as Moshe Safdie expressed interest in Knowles’s Owens Valley aggregations. The Owens Valley megastructures and the solar envelope studies addressed similar issues, but at vastly different scales. The solar envelope projects considered the scale of a neighbourhood, or even a single building, whereas the megastructures applied similar principles to the scale of urban superform.

33

Knowles, 124.

34

Knowles, 188.

35

Knowles, 132.

36

Knowles, 145–154.

A LABORATORY FOR
COLLECTIVE DESIGN

Knowles’s vision of interdependent design followed from his view that natural forces could include not only the laws of the physical environment but also the rules of social organization. The notion of design frameworks for collective resource allocation is at the heart of the solar envelope project and the speculative urbanism of the Owens Valley project. For Knowles, the benefits of collectivity extended to design culture itself, and he insisted that laboratory techniques and a collaborative culture were fundamental to the design profession.

Ellipsoidal diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 1963

Ellipsoidal diagrammatic study model of gravitational force, 1963

Ellipsoidal diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Ellipsoidal diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Ellipsoidal diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

Ellipsoidal diagrammatic solar study model, 1963

1/

The collectivism of Knowles’s approach vividly illustrates the spirit of the Design Science Decade, which Buckminster Fuller declared in 1963. Fuller hoped to unify design culture through collective knowledge and methods directed toward equitable global prosperity. The texts he developed to introduce the Design Science Decade included detailed and geographically specific inventories of the world’s resources that were intended to serve as a basis for speculative planning scenarios. According to Fuller, equitable prosperity could only come through collective action. His World Game, a large-scale role-playing planning exercise deployed extensively during the Design Science Decade, was an attempt to engineer play conditions that would reveal solutions to problems of systemic global interdependence. The World Game was played on an enormous board the size of a basketball court, representing a territory with resources to be leveraged collectively. The experience was decidedly modern and media intensive, with projected maps of electrical networks, air transport, mineral and food resources, and population centres. This territorial correlation of multiple forces and resources resonates deeply with Knowles’s Owens Valley research. The discretized territorial maps of Knowles’s project recall Fuller’s resource inventories and the global planning concerns expressed in the World Game. The Design Science Decade began the year Knowles started at USC, and almost exactly coincided with Konrad Wachsmann’s career there, between 1964 and 1974. The need for collaborative strategies for collective prosperity was underlined in stark terms at the end of the Design Science Decade, with the oil shortages of 1973.

In the Natural Forces Laboratory, Knowles created an organizational blueprint for modern design research that is instructive as today’s architects increasingly embrace environmental research as a catalyst for design innovation. For Knowles, sunlight and the landscape’s relationship with it served as a fundamental parameter in a complex network of ecological analysis for organizing and adapting urban form. Collective and analytic, deep but not hermetic, Knowles’s solar envelope concept suggests the critical reciprocity between collaborative empirical research and evidence-based design in an age of accelerating environmental, political, and economic shocks—lessons for a still-new science of equitable urban form.

THE NATURAL FORCES LABORATORY
Works Cited

Barber, Daniel. “The Thermoheliodon: Climatic Architecture at the End of Calculation.” ARPA Journal 1 (May 2014). http://www.arpajournal.net/thermoheliodon/.

Chen, Xing. “Computerization of Ralph Knowles Heliodon.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 2008.

Ferriss, Hugh. The Metropolis of Tomorrow. New York: Ives Washburn, 1929.

Jenness, James R. “The Globoscope.” Solar Energy 19, no. 4 (1977): 361–363.

Knowles, Ralph. Sun Rhythm Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

Lehnerer, Alex. Grand Urban Rules. Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2014.

McBride, Joe R. The World’s Urban Forests: History, Composition, Design, Function and Management. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017.

Olgyay, Victor. Design with Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Olgyay, Victor. “Report on the Thermoheliodon: Laboratory Machine for Testing Thermal Behavior of Buildings through Model Structures.” Submitted to the National Science Foundation, June 1956.

Pleijel, Gunnar. The Computation of Natural Radiation in Architecture and Town Planning. Stockholm: Victor Pettersons Bokindustri Aktiebolag, 1954.

Rannells, John. “Plotting the Sun.” Progressive Architecture (September 1950): 72–75.

The Natural Forces Laboratory: Ralph Knowles and the Instrumentalized Studio is part of Studies in the Design Laboratory, a series of digital publications produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design that investigates case studies of the laboratory environment as an incubator for the integration of digital tools into design practice in the second half of the twentieth century.

Authors
Andrew Witt and Christopher Reznich

Editor-in-charge
Andrew Goodhouse

Design
Eric Hu and Matthew Tsang

Design Assistant
James Oh

Development
Daniel Hirunrusme

Special thanks to Ralph Knowles

Unless otherwise noted, all material from the personal archive of Ralph Knowles. © Ralph Knowles

CCA The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is an international research centre and museum founded on the conviction that architecture is a public concern. Based on its extensive collection, exhibitions, programs, and research opportunities, the CCA is a leading voice in advancing knowledge, promoting public understanding, and widening thought and debate on architecture, its history, theory, practice, and role in society today.

CCA BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Phyllis Lambert, Founding Director Emeritus
Bruce Kuwabara, Chair
Pierre-André Themens, Vice-Chair

Guido Beltramini, Stephen R. Bronfman, Barry Campbell, Michael Conforti, Timur Galen, Normand Grégoire, Isabelle Jomphe, Sylvia Lavin, Frederick Lowy, Gerald Sheff, Mirko Zardini

Honorary Members:
Serge Joyal, Warren Simpson

GSD The Harvard University Graduate School of Design educates leaders in design, research, and scholarship to make a resilient, just, and beautiful world.

© 2018 Canadian Centre for Architecture and Harvard University Graduate School of Design

ISBN 978-1-927071-55-7

For more information on CCA publications, please visit
www.cca.qc.ca/publications.
For more information on GSD publications, please visit
www.gsd.harvard.edu/publications.

Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920 rue Baile
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3H 2S6

Harvard University Graduate School of Design
48 Quincy Street, Gund Hall 422
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States