Drawing on Nature's Rhythms for Architecture and Urban Design:Ritual House...A Book by Ralph Knowles

Celebrated architect Ralph Knowles, Distinguished Emeritus at University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, has carefully crafted a book for architects, designers, planners—anyone who yearns to reconnect to the natural world through the built environment.

He shows us how to re-examine a shadow, a wall, a window, a landscape, as they respond to the natural cycles of heat, light, wind, and rain.

Analyzing methods of sheltering that range from a Berber tent to a Spanish courtyard to the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles, Ritual House shows us the future: by coining the concept of solar access zoning, he introduces a radical yet increasingly viable solution for tomorrow’s mega-cities.

From his early writings about solar geometry—the physics of sun and earth—Ralph Knowles has become increasingly interested in the cultural response, the rituals and built artifacts that respond to the sun.

It is not only the trace of the shadow cast, it is the flux of life that responds, whether the movement of the Anasazi Indians in and around the pueblos to take advantage of daily and seasonal sun or activities of modern living. Life on earth follows the sun as it arches across our skies in predictable ways. Knowles’ early books were about that geometry.

The range of human responses is richer, more unpredictable, and inspiring. This book is about that poetry. Although this book is about the sun, buildings, and cities, Knowles has not given us a text about solar design. Look to earlier books for those texts.

This book is based on astute observation and reflection, and is thus far wiser. It relates incidents and anecdotes, and is thus more interesting.

(In a) lecture that Ralph Knowles gave before an audience of architecture students, faculty, and professionals. He was showing illustrations of Acoma Pueblo and his studies that indicated solar angles that could possibly explain what was in the mind of the builders of these ancient cities.
Knowles stood in front of the lecture podium, deliberately placing his feet and facing the hall.

He asked us to imagine that he was facing south at the center of a sundial or solar clock. With arms raised and pointing in opposite directions to left and right (due east and west), he said that on two days of the year, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, “the sun rises here [waving his left hand] and sets here [waving the right hand], no matter where we are standing at any position in the northern hemisphere.”

He then stretched his arms back and explained that, depending on our exact latitude, this might be where the sun rises and sets in summer and then moving his arms forward, where it might rise and set in winter. He then explained how the altitude of the sun depends on latitude, tracing the arc of the sun with his arms as we might see it in winter (low in the sky) and in summer (high in the sky).
**(Excerpted from 2doWORLD)