The Search for Solar Architecture in Asia in the Works of the Architect Antonin Raymond: A Protracted Balance between Culture and Nature

Abstract

The renowned architect Antonin Raymond undertook a large amount of work in Japan for more than fifty years. He arrived to the archipelago as a partner to Frank Lloyd Wright, who had received the commission for the paramount Imperial Hotel. Nevertheless, Raymond became almost revolutionary in that country for his realizations of projects and buildings. Simultaneously, he pioneered the concept of solar houses, a notion that proved to be fundamental for bioclimatic design. Raymond realized that because of the influence of geomancy and Daoism, the buildings of Japan had a sort of cosmic link, especially to the sun and the seasons, and in this way, he took great concern with solar exposure, shading, and daylighting, both in the way in which they were composed and also in the materials that were employed, such as lumber, reed roofs, and paper screens. We have tried to identify these trends in his most significant buildings and establish a sequence of how they evolved towards a contemporary and truly sustainable design. The main result presented is that for the reasons presented, Raymond influenced a number of celebrated architects in Japan, India, and the USA. In fact, instead of pursuing the pure abstract minimalism common in his epoch, he made use of the ideas of naturalism in architecture, which in the case of Asia were related to ritual cosmology. In this article, we have outlined how such a procedure was possible and what it entailed for complex domains such as sun-lighting and daylighting, ventilation, acoustics, and re-interpretation of vernacular architecture. The connection with the main forces of the environment, which effectively interact through architecture, when considered from a philosophical and even spiritual point of view as he did, resulted in a kind of artistic revitalization of traditions belonging to Daoism and Shintoism and inaugurated a new manner of sustainable thinking for the building profession that endures today.

Art and the City’s Fiction in Japanese-American internment camps. Sequels for sustainability.

“…Notes 1 It is the Sansei, through the Japanese American Citizens League, in their Redress movement, who finally succeeded in 1988 in getting the U.S. Congress to pass the Civil Liberties Act, which provided a presidential apology and a symbolic payment of $20,000 to people whose civil rights had been violated by the federal government during World War II. To some extent, this article resonates with another research that we have published about Antonin Raymond, a Western architect strongly influenced by Japanese philosophy, and where we have glimpsed suggestive elements of sustainability [25,26] 3 One example is that the Freer Gallery and the Sackler Gallery (part of the Smithsonian network of museums in Washington, specifically the Asian Art Museum) house part of the legacy of Tessai Tamioka, who became the official painter to the Meiji Emperor in 1907. The attention that collectors Freer and Arthur M. Sackler paid to this painter, who followed the Chinese tradition in Japan, is well documented in the Cowles Collection and the exhibition Meeting Tessai: Modern Japanese Art from the Cowles Collection.…”

Thermal Calculation for the Implementation of Green Walls as Thermal Insulators on the East and West Facades in the Adjacent Areas of the School of Biological Sciences, Ricardo Palma University (URP) at Lima, Peru 2023

“…Bioclimatic architecture involves designing buildings that adapt to the local climate using passive strategies [40,41], with the aim of achieving a favorable indoor environmental quality and minimizing energy consumption [42,43]. There are two approaches to bioclimatic architecture: analytical bioclimatic design and symptomatic bioclimatic design.…”