Solar architecture
The use of flexible thin-film photovoltaic modules provides fluid integration with steel roofing profiles, enhancing the building's design.
Orienting a building to the sun, selecting materials with favorable thermal mass or light dispersing properties, and designing spaces that naturally circulate air also constitute solar architecture.
Up until that time, the Greeks' main source of fuel had been charcoal, but due to a major shortage of wood to burn they were forced to find a new way of heating their dwellings.
These revolutions, coupled with overhangs that kept out the hot summer sun, created structures which required very little heating and cooling.
Much like the Greek and Roman buildings, the cliffs in which the indigenous people of this region built their homes were oriented towards the south with an overhang to shade them from the midday sun during the summer months and capture as much of the solar energy during the winter as possible.
While this principle sounds useful in theory, significant engineering problems have thwarted almost all active solar architecture in practice.
A more complex and modern incarnation of solar architecture was introduced in 1954 with the invention of the photovoltaic cell by Bell Labs.
Early cells were extremely inefficient and therefore not widely used, but throughout the years government and private research has improved the efficiency to a point where it is now a viable source of energy.
a company called Oxford Photovoltaics has developed perovskite solar cells that are thin enough to incorporate into windows.
In a double glazed greenhouse, three effects occur: no convection (air blocking), ray keeping (the ground absorbs a photon, emits it with lower infrared energy, and the glass reflects this infrared to the ground), and little conduction (double glazing).
The photothermic module has become popular in Mediterranean countries, with Greece and Spain counting with 30–40% of homes equipped with this system, and becoming part of the landscape.
A pragmatic rule is to put the photovoltaic surface facing the sunny cardinal point, with a latitude-equal angle to the horizontal.
In autonomous (off-grid) photovoltaic systems, batteries are used to store the excess of electricity, and deliver it when needed in the night.
The white walls covered with lime and the blue roofs make the Greek islands' traditional style appreciated by tourists for its colors, and by the inhabitants for the cooler interior air.
The Heliodome has been built in such a way that the roof hides the Sun in the summer to avoid overheating, and lets the sunlight pass in the winter.
One of the first large commercial buildings to exemplify solar architecture is 4 Times Square in New York City.
It has built-in solar panels on the 37th through the 43rd floors, and incorporated more energy-efficient technology than any other skyscraper at the time of its construction.
[4] The National Stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, is a dragon-shaped structure that has 8,844 solar panels on its roof.
Constructed completely of recycled materials, it is the largest solar-powered stadium in the world and powers the surrounding neighborhood when it is not in use.
The Sundial Building in China was built to symbolize the need for replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources.
The building is shaped like a fan and is covered in 4,600 square metres (50,000 sq ft) of solar panels.
On the contrary, fossil and fissile energies are cheap in the beginning, but cost tremendous amounts to humans and nature.
"[10] In the article it is stated multiple times that solar panels are not an architect's first choice for building material because of their cost and aesthetics.
