1 FUTURES SO BRIGHT: SOLAR HOMES IN MID-TWENTIENTH CENTURY AMERICA

The promise of solar architecture seduces the American imagination at regular intervals. Enthusiasm for solar just as regularly fades, leaving the next seemingly inevitable generation to grope in the darkness, knowing someone must have thought of, and perhaps even solved, these issues before, but having little actual evidence to go on. My dissertation is an attempt to recover some of that history by looking at one specific moment—the years immediately preceding and following World War II—to examine the experimentation and excitement surrounding the solar home in America and consider the reasons for its demise. While energy efficiency and renewable energies are the current trend, memory about the development of solar technologies tends to extend only to the oil crisis-induced projects of the 1970s. Earlier experiments have faded almost completely from the history. When they are included, it is part of an interrupted narrative where, in the 1940s and early 50s, numerous and varied sources claimed solar architecture was the inevitable wave of the future, but as fuel prices fell in the mid-1950s, the American public rejected solar housing until the 1970s. Restoring this history not only helps t