Negotiating Ungers. The Aesthetics of Sustainablity. The Solar House

In 1980 german architect Oswald Mathias Ungers participated in a competition for solar housing. Though Ungers’ contribution received a special prize, his design never materialized and has since fallen into oblivion. Designing solar housing meant Ungers was faced with a new field. As an outsider to the contemporary debates on sustainability, he approached the assignment with a particular position: the energy efficiency of the houses should not depend on construction and building technology. Instead, energy should be understood as a dimension of architecture itself, as an integral part of the design. developed through research started with a summer school at the Ungers Archiv für Architekturwissenschaft in Cologne in 2018 the publication contextualizes Ungers’ design in contemporary discussions on sustainability and gives a more in-depth view into the ideas behind it.