aokoh

Solar panels have been commercially available since the 1950s — but why didn’t they take off earlier?

If the solar furnace built by the CNRS in 1968 serves as the catalyst for photovoltaic research in France, what could other solar typologies include? If the nuclear cooling tower has been enshrined as a monument on to France’s contemporary landscape what could the new monument to solar energy be? For three decades, the Centrale du Bec provided coal-powered energy to Firminy and Saint Étienne. How can we build upon this artefact? How can this monument be settled around?

"The Solar Society" deals with opposites; vertical and horizontal, material, and immaterial, hi-tech and low-tech. It makes up for its large size in plan for its lack of presence in its height, broken up into smaller pieces to make a collective whole – a village.

The only thing that rises from the mess is its rotating solar monument. From the time the power plant was appropriated by hippie-researchers in 1979 until now where a fully integrated community devoted to photovoltaics dwells, researchers, workers, and environmental enthusiasts all live in the presence of their own rotating energy source.