Page Text: http://socks-studio.com/2021/06/27/energy-as-architectural-matter-oswald-mathias-ungers-solar-house-1980/
In 1980, German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers took part in a competition for a prototypal solar house to develop on a large scale in the community of Landstuhl in Germany and eventually through various settlements across Germany. The competition was a direct descendant of the 1970’s oil crisis and the consequent debate on alternative energies. Ungers’ proposal, a habitat model of low energetic dispersion, received a special prize but never saw the light.
The most striking aspect of the project is that the architect pursued environmental sustainability through the actual rethinking of the house’s logics rather than integrating further technical devices. Ungers’ design introduces energy efficiency as an architectural matter which requires formal solutions and typological inventions.