Ken Butti and John Perlin both open their book with the historical Socrates and Plato criticizing their own country for the deforestation causes by the inadequate technology to heat a home some 2,500 years ago, and that food shortages, shipping and home building industries, and the goat population were also major contributing factors. After some time, it became clear that the sun was an abundant energy source, able to heat homes. This is how solar architecture became to be, as the Greeks learned to harness the sun’s energy to heat the homes in the winter, and cool them in the summer. The Greeks soon started to build an addition to the city Olynthus, which was to be called North Hill. This city was one of the first cities to be planned to effectively use solar architecture and implement it into the community. After North Hill, cities like Priene and Delos started being built. However, due to Greece’s diverse topography, Pirene and Delos ,unlike North Hill, were to be built on the side of mountains. In the end, evidence proved that these architectural ingenuities paid off and were, mostly, a widespread success. The same happened with ancient Rome, the wood sources were starting to deplete due to the major demand for fuel. Not only was their demand for wood high, but their occupied region was much larger compared to the Greek empire; causing different regions of the empire to employ different architectural techniques. To attempt to subside Rome’s generally massive demand for wood-fueled heat, Vitruvius, a student of Greek architecture, suggested solar architecture to cool the homes in the hotter Africa, and to heat the homes in the Northern Europe areas. A large example of this architecture was the public baths, usually large indoor pools for commoners to come and bath and use for recreation use, whether it be warm baths, steam rooms, or pools. The sun played such a strong role in the energy savings the Romans were worried about, that, as buildings and communities start to grow, sunlight was becoming more scarce, as buildings would block, or make shadows in the way of other buildings, which caused enough conflict to take to Roman court and debate upon it. After the fall of the Roman Empire, most of Europe ignored the benefits of solar-aware architecture, and was criticized in comparison to China, who, at the time of around the 17th century, remained loyal to the sun’s power, and thrived. Another downfall to the Industrialized society of 1800’s England, was the slums of overcrowded, poor lot of migrant workers. Some problems were answered, as laws and acts started popping up around Europe, addressing the demand and need for sunlight for each resident. The reform for sunlight sparked interest in France and Germany. Germany started incorporating larger windows and glass heat trapping into their architecture post-war, which was a perfect opportunity for ingenuity and innovation. However, they were too consumed in their architectural imagination, that most of Germany forgot to include the needed sunlight when building their popular and widely used grid-like apartment complexes. In the end, Hugo Haring started the movement to single-unit housing, which correctly implemented the use of southern facing houses/rooms. Besides Germany, not many countries had large solar architectural movements, Switzerland being the runner-up. America was soon to follow, starting with solar aware single-unit houses, with the author drawing comparisons to that of Spanish communities, but again the idea was shot down by the mass of immigrants pouring into the cities in the mid 1800’s. Certain homes that were specifically designed to implement solar architecture were built and they were praised at and even turned around the beliefs of some originally skeptic critics. The second article “Solar Energy Planning” takes a look at the beginning of solar architecture, stating that as time progressed away from the beginning of mankind, communities and cities realized the power of the sun to use for heat and warmth. Certain ancient cities harnessed this power more than others, but as time progressed into what is now current society, we have leaned more towards the green city planning, implementing vegetation and recreational parks rather than individual energy saving architecture.

Reflection: The Romans, in my opinion, were probably better innovators for the Green City ideas than humans are now. They showed concern for their ecosystem when they noticed that their wood was depleting and turned to using nature to work for them, building their communities around a self-reliant heating system, that changed bi-yearly to adapt to the change of the season. They used this innovative architecture and tamed it to have infrastructures and societal living standards that are similar to today’s society. Butti and Perlin explain that the Romans adored the public bath and that people would congregate around there, as if it was the parks and greenbelts that Ebenezer Howard, Jane Jacobs, and Frederick Olmsted, going there to work out, gossip, take steam baths, listening to music, swimming, eating vendor’s food, and massages all surrounded by expensive mirrors, and artowrk. This is all relaxing, stress free activities that society participates in, usually in public spaces where things like these can happen in a large open space. When put into perspective, Olmsted always said that open space and natural aesthetics truly helped people, physically, socially, emotionally, and mentally, but sunlight is a largely under-estimated tool to Green City ideals.