Phase-Change: Maria Telkes after the Dover Sun House

As the landmarks of architectural history are reconfigured according to the pressures of environmental crises, the Dover Sun House (1948) will likely assume a prominent position. Designed by Eleanor Raymond with the MIT engineer Maria Telkes, the house was built in 1948 on a site outside Boston. In this temperate climate, it was an "all‐solar house": there was no mechanical heating system. Winter heat was provided through a complex system of absorbing solar radiation and storing it in chemical compounds.

Today the house is not well known; neither is the fact that the late '40s was a period of intense anxiety over the depletion of energy resources. The Dover Sun House, as one of the most technologically aggressive of the solar houses in the period, was a catalyst for those arguing for the importance of "alternative energy" in the world's energy metabolism. Maria Telkes's presentations to UN conferences, corporate boardrooms, and philanthropic missions made her a central figure in a diffuse network attempting to harness the power of the sun to expand the economic and industrial possibilities of the so‐called "underdeveloped countries." This presentation will explore her exploits in the context of contemporary assumptions about the political valence of alternative energy technologies.