Bringing Architecture to Light:
The Pioneering Work of William Atkinson
Jeffrey Stein, Professor
Department of Architecture


In May of 1997, Associate Professor Jeffrey Stein, Head of Wentworth’s Department of Architecture, was among an international group of architects invited to participate in a research competition over the internet. Sponsored by the Society of Building Science Educators, the entries were juried by members of its Board of Directors, including Don Watson, Dean of the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, whose contractor father graduated from Wentworth in the 1930s. The competition’s chief requirement was to document the first architect of the modern era (1910 and later) who produced architecture which recognized and espoused what we now understand as the art and science of passive solar design. What follows is an expansion of Professor Stein’s winning entry.


"Passive Solar" is the name architects and others have given to a way of designing buildings that allows those buildings and their occupants to be warmed in winter by sunlight. Passive solar buildings often also cool themselves in summer by providing shade. No mechanical equipment is used in a passive system: no panels, no pumps, no chemicals. Comfort both winter and summer is provided simply (well, it’s not that simple . . .) by how buildings display themselves to the sun. It is a surprise to most people to learn that Boston is the city where many of the ancient rules for designing "passive solar" buildings were first rediscovered by 20th century architects, led by one architect in particular ñ William Atkinson.

William Atkinson, a Fellow of the Boston Society of Architects at the turn of the last century, was one of the pioneers in the movement to rediscover "Passive Solar" design. He was a researcher, writer, and builder involved with the topic of ì . . . the principles which ought to govern the planning of buildings with respect to sunlight." (Atkinson, The Orientation of Buildings, John Wily & Sons, NY, 1912, v) Some of those principles include orientation ñ buildings oriented so their east-west axis is longer than north-south; where to place windows in a building ñ generally, at the south wall; what sort of roof overhang will allow sunlight in winter and shade in summer; how to plan city streets so that citizens in all buildings will have access to sunlight in wintertime.

Atkinson focused much of his research on the design of a single building type: the hospital. He wrote in The Orientation of Buildings that he felt designing a hospital was a "sacred trust" the highest calling of an architect. He lectured about issues of sunlight and its effect on hospital design ñ and on cities in general ñ at MIT, and his work on the subject was published in THE NATIONAL HOSPITAL RECORD and in THE BRICKBUILDER magazine. The ideas he worked out about orienting hospital buildings to realize the maximum effect of sunlight in different seasons were included in the book, THE AMERICAN HOSPITAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, by Edward Stevens, Architect (F.W. Dodge Publishers, NY, 1928). There, Atkinson presents a series of diagrams showing shadow studies of building shapes and orientations (p. 3) along with ways to create building interiors for optimal sunlight. In addition, the book cites dozens of hospitals across America whose layout and patient’s well being, presumably, owe much to the work of William Atkinson. His own design of the Newport, Rhode Island, hospital around 1910 took full advantage of his passive solar research.

In an essay published by John Wiley & Sons, NY, 1894, Atkinson wrote, "To study properly the question of sunlight, a sun plan of the buildings must be drawn, and their positions considered with respect to the shadows they cast upon each other and upon the ground." Atkinson is talking about urban design here, and he got the chance to practice passive solar urban design when his committee at the Boston Society of Architects helped to draft legislation regulating the height of buildings in Boston in 1904. The purpose was to guarantee the traditional right of Bostonians to sunlight under the law. You can see how the tradition worked by looking around Boston’s South End in winter. Even in December, when the sun is low in the sky, the shadows cast by most of the four- and five-story buildings fall on the ground, just at the foundations of neighboring buildings to their north. They do not block the sun from their neighbors.

This tradition, and Atkinson’s new law guaranteeing it, was challenged in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1909. A Boston building developer named Welch, anxious to utilize the technology that could make buildings taller and rents bigger, brought suit against the city of Boston. Mr. Welch and his lawyers challenged the constitutionality of this new zoning law that, essentially, placed the welfare of one’s neighbors ahead of one’s own unfettered right to make money from private property. The US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law in Welch v Board of Appeal of the City of Boston on May 17, 1909. (Atkinson, ORIENTATION, p. 120). By upholding Atkinson’s ñ and Boston’s ñ law, the Court in this case brought forward the old English statute of ancient lights to modern America. Under that English law, the owner or tenant of a building may acquire a right to light coming across the property of another, just as, more commonly in America, a right-of-way across the land of another may be acquired by prescription.

In THE ORIENTATION OF BUILDINGS, or Planning for Sunlight (printed both in the US and in England), Atkinson was the first to describe for the layperson all the astronomical data necessary to calculate sun-angles for any season of the year and for any latitude. He developed the method of the "shadow curve," an application of the principles of descriptive geometry to the recording of transitory occurrences. That is, Atkinson’s charts can be used to show where buildings will cast shadows at any time of any day of the year.

He also devotes a chapter of ORIENTATION to the study of sunlight passing through windows of buildings, and describes his experiments with the "sun box," including records generated with these boxes during the summer, fall and winter of 1910. The sun box was a box or chamber (about 1 cubic foot inside) of non-heat conducting material, having on one side a window or light of glass, sealed tight to prevent air leakage." (p. 63). The box was made of 7/8î pine boards covered inside with lino-felt (a non-heat conducting material made of flax fiber quilted between two thicknesses of building paper.) The window that created one wall of the box was one-quarter-inch plate glass. The box was painted white on the outside, and shielded from sun’s direct ray ñ except the window ñ by a larger wooden hood (p. 64). Temperatures inside the box were measured with a thermometer mounted on the back wall of the box and protected from direct sunlight. On December 22, 1910, he was able to generate temperatures of 115 degrees Fahrenheit in a box facing directly south at 1:42 PM in outside air of 24 degrees F.

Atkinson’s success with the sun-box experiments led him to construct a larger, habitable space the following year for a client, Mr. Samuel Cabot, in Canton, Massachusetts. A one-room building, sited on the south slope of a hill on the Cabot estate, with a glazed wall facing south, it frequently generated temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, not consistent during days where outside temperatures were zero or below (Atkinson, 78). Mr. Cabot apparently used the little building for a study. By opening its windows and allowing cold winter air to enter from the outside, the high indoor temperatures could be modulated and made comfortable.

Architecture is a discipline which is understood, more and more, to be "knowledge-based." The designs for buildings are not developed based only on an architect’s "impressions," or "just to be different," but occur as the result of documented material and behavioral information, gathered as a result of empirical experiments like those undertaken by William Atkinson early in the 20th century. Here was a Boston architect who wrote books about passive solar issues, lectured about them in one of America’s oldest schools of Architecture, was cited in numerous publications, influenced the form of hospitals for sunlight by example and design, directly affected the form of America’s cities for solar access through legislation and case law, undertook real-life/real-time passive solar experiments, and actually built a habitable solar building! This all adds up to a remarkable series of accomplishments that we should celebrate and build upon ourselves. Studying architecture in Boston involves studying Boston itself; look critically as you travel around our city and see if you can detect the influence of William Atkinson, America’s solar pioneer.

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