"The Sun, ‘mother’ star of the solar system around which various bodies, including the Earth, revolve, whose fusion core produces energy and releases electromagnetic radiation, a flow of particles and neutrinos. In the last two years, a surge of this radiation caused storms capable of disrupting electrical grid transmissions on Earth.
Located in the Orion Arm, the Sun not only significantly influences the climate on Earth, but is also the protagonist of recurring cosmogonic visions – from the ancient Egyptians, to pre-Columbian civilizations, to Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun – that place it at the center of religious and political systems as a source of irradiation and emanation (of life, power, knowledge). Studied and venerated, it has inspired various architectural works and projects that dedicate spaces and territories to it. Omnipresent in the latest modernity as a protagonist to whom we leave space in design and in reality, on which we set orientations, on the basis of which we build rotating buildings, countless projects bear its name or sign such as, for example, the Solar Pavilion by the Smithsons or Villa Girasole by Angelo Invernizzi.
The subject of constructions entirely dedicated to welcoming its energy, such as the Solar House by Oswald Mathias Ungers or Haus Regensburg by Thomas Herzog, or design to avoid its irradiation because, as William Atkins writes in The Immeasurable World. Jurneys in Desert Places, ‘You can come to dread the sun, even when shelter and water are at hand: its heat, but also its light. No sooner has it risen than I long for it to set’."
Italian/English texts
