The Solar Ship and Heliotrope House by Rolf Disch
Today I took a stroll through a sustainable housing development in Freiburg called Vauban. One of the masterpieces of the neighborhood comes from the work of solar architect Rolf Disch. He has two very prominent works in Vauban: the Solar Ship and the Heliotrope house.
A heliotrope is a flower that moves with the sun. The heliotrope house performs the same action, but with slightly different mechanisms. The house is build from a central cylindrical structure that rotates about its central axis to follow the movement of the sun. A large solar installation called a "sun sail" is mounted atop of house and can rotate independently. The black tubes along the balcony are solar thermal collectors that absorb heat from the sun and from the hands of the residence as they watch the sunset on the vineyards in the Rhine Valley - the collectors double as a balustrades for the balcony. The glass on the house is vacuum sealed for installation and the front and back sides of the house have two different types of glass that let in different amounts of heat from the sun. During the winter the better absorbing glass lets in more heat from the sun, but as the seasons change the house rotates and as summer sets in the more heat resistant faces of the house rotates with the sun keeping the house cool. I am sure there are many other sustainable features to the house to keep the consumption very low, but I haven't delved deeper than the small pamphlet I found. I do know that the house produces five times as much energy as it consumes.
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| Source: Rolf Dish Solar Architecture - http://www.rolfdisch.de/ |
The solar ship is a commercial and residential building. It has an organic grocery store and other sustainability oriented shops on the bottom floor and business of different sizes on the first two floors. Atop the commercial structure sits nine penthouses. I believe there are two penthouses in the four right-most structures with the solar roofs and one large penthouse under the left-most solar roof. The inspiration behind the building is a ship sailing into the future on solar power.
I have yet to dig deeply into this design and mainly the economics of the solar ship, but the firm says the higher construction costs are offset by the sale of excess electricity from the solar installations. I have contacted the firm requesting a meeting, so if I find out more details I will update this post.
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The surrounding area is equally beautiful. Here is a picture of the vineyards just behind the Heliotrope house. Overall, it was a very pleasant outing and may have planted a seed to think differently about the applications of solar power. At this point though, it is too early to tell. However, it does provide an example of the cutting edge and a showpiece for other communities to look up to.
It was a really pleasant "field trip".
