Elon Musk, Testa Solar Panels Presentation, 2016.

Imitative solar panels - designed by companies including Sistine Solar and Tesla - call into question the relationship between infrastructural aesthetics and the urgent need to conserve material resources in the current climate. Can conservation really only be sold in a dress? Is the conflation of the two our only way out of the environmental crisis? 

To whatever sense of ‘atmosphere’ we shift our attention, we might falsely assume the other is altogether absent. In a short chapter of his book, The Life of Lines, the anthropologist Tim Ingold considers the inborn conflict that gives shape to this elusive term. “For meteorologists,” Ingold writes, “the atmosphere is the gaseous envelope that surrounds our planet, [while] for aestheticians, on the other hand, atmosphere is all about sensory experience: it is a space of affect.”

Though the origins of the term ‘atmosphere’ belong to the scientific community of the 17th century, its disambiguation has since produced distinct cultures with distinct occupations: climatologists, environmental engineers and catastrophe risk analysts on one side; interior designers, furniture craftsmen and sommeliers on the other.

The ease by which these distinctions have been made reflect many others beyond the concept of ‘atmosphere,’ including those of knowledge and discernment themselves. It mirrors the split of the haptic experience of space and its scrupulous measurement, the abstract and the concrete, observation and sight, and that between material science and materiality.

it is from the coming together of persons and things that atmospheres arise: they are not objective, yet they inhere in the qualities of things; they are not subjective, yet they belong to sensing beings”

Further in Ingold’s argument, however, the clean split between two atmospheres becomes their entanglement. He writes that ultimately  “it is from the coming together of persons and things that atmospheres arise: they are not objective, yet they inhere in the qualities of things; they are not subjective, yet they belong to sensing beings.”

‘Atmosphere’ may therefore not necessarily act as a dividing line between the arts and the sciences, but rather as an “intermediate between environmental qualities and human states.” Similar to Steven Connor’s study of the relationship between weather and culture, he wrote that the two are “connected only by mediations so vast and complex that no nontrivial determinations can really be established.” The venn diagram that might one day be drawn out of the overlap of the two ‘atmospheres,’ if it was ever constructed, would therefore be as hazy as both the cirrus clouds and the mood spaces to which the term gives dimension.

In the search for a cultural object that might complicate the already complicated subject of ‘atmosphere,’ the patents for solar energy, in their brief history as either architecture’s imposition or their co-conspirator, reveal the current state of ‘atmosphere’ as it leans against our comprehension. The political divide unique to the use of solar energy reflects our discomfort with the concept of ‘atmosphere,’ however the sun may pierce its many layers. Consider that the divide between meteorologists and aestheticians recapitulates the split between engineers and architects concerning the concept of solar energy as it emerged in the early 1940’s.

The cover of a 1944 catalog for Libbey-Owens-Ford sums up the uniquely architectural response to the sun’s potential prowess. It reads, “Solar Houses: an Architectural Lift in Living.” No statement better summarizes the long-standing mythological connection commonly made between the sun’s illumination and the literary use of the word ‘illumination’ itself - the desire for ‘lightness’ as opposed to ‘heaviness,’ ‘wickedness,’ and the doldrums of a life void of contact with sunlight - the ‘lift in living’ granted by sunlight as a modern surrogate for the uplifting of the spirit that in the past was summarized by the stretching of cruciformed columns towards the celestial.

In the right corner, the picture of a brimming sun, with suggestive eyebrows and pouty lips, is completed by radiating lines of light as a child might draw them. Framed within these youthful beams is an image of an interior bathed in light afforded by enormous planes of glass, bordered by table lamps that are purely decorative only until the sun has fully set.

This is an atmosphere that subscribes almost entirely to the aesthetical, with only the slightest nod to the meteorological sun as a light source and distant heat. In this light, the sun is the nourishment of our bodies and minds; one experienced directly by our skin and instinctively above our heads. “Good living just blossoms in this kind of warmth,” a later advertisement reads.

Contrasting the aesthetical ‘atmosphere’ are the responses to ‘solar energy’ developed by many engineers of the same period. The MIT Solar House, for example, originally developed in 1940 and described by its creator Hoyt Hottel as “a strange-looking little building,” is arguably the first attempt to compromise the shape and contents of the single-family home to actively store and re-deploy solar energy.

Notably, the house was not designed for the warmth of sunlight to enter the interior, but instead to be intercepted by flat-plate collectors on the roof just above, heating up water pipes that circumnavigate the interior to funnel down into a tank beneath the home that it dwarfs in section. The tanks maintained the water’s heat to transfer it to tall, metal drums that lined the home’s interior like wallpaper so that they may - miraculously - provide both heating in the dead of winter and air conditioning in the warmer months.

The roof, positioned a shallow 30 degrees from horizontal, achieved what the industry calls an ‘optimum tilt angle’ at the expense of the iconically symmetrical roof pitch that was then the standard in every climate. It reflected a vernacular not determined by the culture and history of the region in which it sits, but rather, the very specific siting of the house on the Earth’s surface against the mirroring curvature of the sun.

The human body is not understood here as a direct beneficiary of the sun’s heat, but rather its eventual recipient in a process that must be arcane to those that have not referred to published diagrams. The human body, in other words, loses its agency as a medium for the sun’s energy.

The proposal was such that the nourishment the skin received no longer came from the sun directly but was rather delayed, bypassed and complicated through several degrees of separation. In its very first conception, the architectural aesthetic of 20th century meteorology resisted the symbolic to instead privilege the relative abstraction of solar energy collection.

At this point it should be recalled that, of course, houses have always been shaped by the subtleties of the climate, or what Tim Ingold again calls the ‘Weather-World.’ He writes that “even the residents of the hyper-modern city have to contend with the weather, despite their best efforts to banish it to the exterior of their air-conditioned, temperature-regulated, artificially lit and glass-enclosed buildings. We are all subject to its vagaries, to varying degrees.”

The ubiquity of sloping roofs alone signify the transferring of rain and snow to avoid accumulation, while the vestibules, windows, and walls of varying insulation reflect the tension between the weather we would like to bring with us inside and that which we would not. The two aforementioned models of living, as they represent the divide of ‘atmosphere,’ each in their own way imagined themselves as the continuation of our brave new steps into the ‘Weather-World’ as the benefits of working with the sun were newly considered on a domestic scale in the middle of the twentieth century.

And yet by driving around any suburb today, we may remind ourselves that it was the “architectural lift in living” that became the standard over the “strange-looking little building.” The typical house today continues to be the icon of an older knowledge of meteorology, while the recent explosion of knowledge in the field has not yet gained traction.

As the two camps defined ‘atmosphere’ for themselves, a mass culture wasted no time in determining exactly where the two might visibly meet and segregate. While mid-century critics including Austin Whillier implored in 1955 that “designing a solar house [should] require close cooperation between the architect [and] the engineer,” there is little evidence of this collaboration on the surfaces of homes to this day.

The contemporary instantiation of the meteorological response, the commonly known but rarely used ‘solar panel,’ is installed on fewer than half a percent of all of America’s rooftops today. It has been engineered over time to become the silver-boxed table of upward-facing mirrors that so apparently conflict with the typically wooden or terracotta roofs upon which it sits. Air-conditioning and fluorescent lighting powered by non-renewable coal, as Ingold pointed out, became the standard simply because they have afforded us an indifference towards the sun’s daily and annual cycles.

The investment of our own, alternative rhythms, independent of those of the sun and the meteorological atmosphere in general, was predicted as early as 1913 by modernist artworks such as the Constructivist opera Victory over the Sun, composed by Mikhail Matyushin and designed by Kazimir Malevich.

The opera, according to the art historian John Bowlt, anticipated “the new, technological world of the fourth dimension illuminated by [electricity,] a [new] artificial [light]source [at the time]… Victory over the Sun can be perceived both as a farewell to the archaic sun and as a gesture to the new electric obsession.”

The voided circle that was presented on stage by Malevich depicts a sun not eclipsed by the moon, but rather by human will. The “old world energy” that the opera rejects is the same one that we reject for what Lissitzky described as our “technological superiority.” Ever since, we have developed fantasies of our own environmental independence while lacking a common sensitivity to the Weather-World beyond what we have already known for millennia - that rain is wet, clouds are gloomy, and the sun is hot.

This shift is the result of the late capitalist investment in the aesthetical atmosphere, or what the philosopher Gernot Bohme refers to as the “aesthetic economy.” This economy, and the aesthetic labor that shapes its production, “designates the totality of those activities which aim to give an appearance to things and people, cities and landscapes,” Bohme writes, “[in order] to endow them with an aura, to lend them an atmosphere, or to generate an atmosphere in ensembles.”

Therefore, on top of the obligation to increasingly improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness by which they harness sunlight, the solar energy industry has additionally been tasked with entering the aesthetic economy that Bohme has described - to incorporate “staging value” in addition to those of use and exchange.

Several patents have been recently filed to ‘beautify’ solar panel grids by assimilating them within more favorable domestic roof paneling designs. One such example is the collaboration between SolarCity and Tesla initiated in 2016 that led to the production of Tesla Solar Panels.

Four glass tile designs were presented at an Apple-style product launch: smooth, textured, slate, and, perhaps the most unbelievable, tuscan glass tile. From the ground level, they do, in fact, appear to be ordinary roof tiles. In their silent dialogue with the sun, the Tesla panels are inarguably more integratable into the current suburban milieu than the mirror alternative - at least because the former recalls the human scale that originally produced the tiles that they now simulate. During the product launch, Elon Musk recalled the engineering that went into uniquely texturing each tile, so that no two would appear alike in mixed company.

From above, however, their solar cells suddenly become visible as rounded squares within their larger frames. A color louver film layer, essentially a lenticular, conceals the full construct of the tiles from below while giving the solar cells full access to the sun’s rays from above. Hence the product’s maddening tagline: “Power from above, beauty from the street.”

Thus summarizes an often-made, heavy-handed assumption - that the split of the term ‘atmosphere’ could somehow be resolved by clever marketing, as though the best way for us to take our medicine is to hide it in our food. The tagline suggests that all that was required, in the short history of solar energy design, was for the ‘power from above’ to align so closely to the demand for ‘beauty from the street’ that the former becomes completely withdrawn from human consciousness. In other words, the integration promised by Tesla solar panels has the effect of butchering the structure of atmospheric discourse that it claims to unify.

The architectural link between the sun and the bodies to which it may give nourishment is here not only abstracted by several degrees of separation - it is now entirely invisible and otherwise untraceable. “Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances,” wrote the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. “Instead of dealing with the things themselves, man is, in a sense, constantly conversing with himself.”

Consider one more alternative to the typical solar panel. Earlier this year, members of the MIT business school developed Sistine Solar, which, according to their website, “creates custom solar panels designed to mimic home facades and other environments, with aims of enticing more homeowners to install photovoltaic systems.”

A split is once again marketed as a unity: the grid that collects photons can now also project images - the solar cells, in other words, double as televisual pixels. They can assume the form of the tiles beneath them, but they are of course not limited to assimilation: they can resemble a grassy thatch, an American flag, and, if one had the perverse desire, their pixels could even simulate the solar cells concealed in their construction.

The Sistine Solar panels therefore add an unlike chapter to the universe of technical images that the philosopher Vilem Flusser developed in 1985. While at home watching Mozart’s opera Cosi fan tutte on his television, he, too, encountered a split. The next day, “on closer inspection,” he wrote, “I saw traces of electrons in the cathode ray tube. I cannot bracket out my knowledge of the granular structure of the visible image… What I actually experienced as beauty yesterday required the calculations and computations of a close reading of the particulate universe.”

While Flusser was able to press his nose up against his television set to reflect on the bipolarity of its signals, the Sistine Solar panels do not offer the same opportunity for close reading. Their clues for discernment are instead limited to their shallow silver boxes and the slight glow of their pixels against an ocean of mute tiles.

“We live in an illusory world of technical images,” Flusser wrote, “and we increasingly experience, recognize, evaluate, and act as a function of these images.  We owe these images to a technology that came from scientific theories that show us ineluctably that “in reality,” everything is a swarm of points in a state of decay, a yawning emptiness. The science and the technology that developed from it, these triumphs of Western civilization, have, on one hand, eroded the objective world around us into nothingness and, on the other, bathed us in a world of illusion.”

Our veiled investment in one half of atmosphere has trained us to fear and otherwise lose sight of the other. We have become, in nearly only one meaning of the expression, “atmo-phobic,” not least because the vast amount of what most of us don’t know about the sun and the rhythm of environmental cycles has been fully suppressed. The modern fear of the air that Peter Sloterdijk diagnosed had successfully made its way into product design.

Though we readily balk at the current situation of solar energy design, we must also recognize how it readily demonstrates the state of ‘atmosphere’ as it resides in today’s aesthetic economy.

So while, on the one hand, the Constructivists and Libbey-Owens-Ford knowingly wished to shed themselves of the meteorological atmosphere for the promises of the aesthetical, and while, on the other hand, the original Solar House team and its successors strove to suppress the aesthetical for the ingenuity of the meteorological, the current consumer market has proven that for every step forward into the haze of ‘atmosphere,’ a step will be taken back.

A victory under the sun must also be against it.