Video: Marjan van Aubel – Solar Futures

Marjan van Aubel opened with a number that stopped the room. Every hour, enough sunlight reaches the earth to power the entire world for a year. One hour. And yet we are still digging into the ground for energy rather than looking up. That tension between what is already there and what we have chosen to ignore, that is what her whole practice is built on.

As I wrote in her speaker introduction, Marjan is a Dutch solar designer whose work asks a deceptively simple question: why does solar energy have to be ugly? Her talk in Düsseldorf gave a lot of answers.

”Solar Futures” begins not in a lab but in ancient history. Stonehenge, aligned to the solstice. The Pantheon in Rome, where a single 8.3-metre opening in the ceiling was designed so precisely that on the founding day of Rome, the sun would fall on exactly the spot where the emperor stood. Marjan called this “cathedral thinking”, building for something centuries beyond yourself. That, she argued, is the kind of long thinking the solar transition needs now.

She also showed what is probably the first solar rooftop installation in New York and asked the audience to guess the year. 1884. Before the car. Before almost everything we associate with modernity. Solar is not a new idea. It is a very old one that we somehow managed to make ugly and then put on the shelf.

The studio tour that followed moved through Current Table, Current Window, the Solar Pavilion at Dutch Design Week, where people ended up dancing on it in the evenings by the glow of the energy it had collected during the day and the Dutch Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo, a fully circular biotope drawing water from desert air, growing plants and mushrooms, every beam borrowed from local manufacturers and returned afterwards.

The talk’s emotional centre was Sunne. She described the feeling of watching a sunset, that instinct to hold the moment before it's gone. Sunne is her attempt to capture that: a solar light that charges in a window during the day and mimics natural sunlight at night. Someone told her the day before: “Basically you have 24-hour sun”. She said she quite liked that.

She closed where she began. Solar design is inevitable. Everything will be integrated with it. Not just buildings, but the small and non-obvious things too. The question is not whether it will happen, but whether we do it from necessity, or with beauty.

More information about Marjan van Aubel on her beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

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