Many cultures have architecture designed with the winter or summer solstice in mind. When the sun is at one of the solstice points, a mark on the wall may be lit with sunlight. I’m sure there are many science buildings designed so that they also have such features, but what about normal buildings? Are there any buildings where their location and orientation just happen to cause the solstice light to uniquely light up something interesting? Or perhaps an architect snuck in some design elements so that the building has some interesting features during the solstice?
As an example, I worked in an office once where at a certain time of the year, the sun would hit a reflective building far away and the light would come straight down my hallway. It was interesting because the shadows on the far wall had super crisp shadows of people walking down the hallway. I don’t remember if it was at a solstice point, but this only happened for a few weeks in the summer at a certain time and then was gone. It’s stuff like this I’m wondering about rather than a science museum with a sundial or something.
I’m going to be in NYC during the winter solstice and this came to mind. I’m wondering if there’s any cool spots I could check out. Or in any city. It’d be fun to check out this kind of stuff if I happened to be vacationing during one of the solstice periods.
People have largely lost touch with natural things. Light pollution, other information, too many surrounding things, scientific explanations, minimal importance now given to eclipses and similar once-quasi-miraculous events… I would be interested if any architects with a personal interest incorporate anything along these lines, but I suspect few do - and a thousand other factors are deemed more important.
Not quite what you are looking for, but I recall reading in a book about someone who mounted a solar cell connected to a chime, so that it rang once a year - on the summer solstice. Always thought that sounded like a neat idea.
And not the solstice, but both NYC and Chicago have an impressive “streethenge” effect on the equinoxes.
Your OP seems to rule out science buildings, so this probably doesn’t count, but…
The Great Lakes Science Center museum in Cleveland has a windmill out front. It also has two concrete walkways in the front yard, in the shape of shadows of the windmill. These two walkways are precisely where the shadow of the windmill would fall, at the next two solar eclipses visible from Cleveland.
It’s well known that twice a year the sun sets down the “Infinite Corridor” at MIT (A quarter mile long hallway that runs through the old main building (“Maclaurin buildings”) at MIT, from the “Little Dome” at 77 Massachusetts Avenue – Building 7 – through building 3 to building 10 – The "Big Dome and the Barker Engineering Library – to building 4 and building 8 – no significant landmarks.
There doesn’t appear to be any deliberate intention to do this. When they built the main buildings at MIT people were still arguing about whether the sun set over the Heel Stone at Stonehenge at Modsummer Day.
Although I created this thread with the solstices in mind, feel free to post any similar solar events like the ones above. They’re interesting, too, and would be worth seeing even if they weren’t actually a solstice event. The thread can be “… with solstice-like features …”
I don’t feel that things like “Manhattanhenge” or the Infinite Corridor should count… Yes, they line up with the Sun at certain times of year, but the only significance to those times of year is that they’re when the Sun lines up with them. It’s not like the architect said “I want to make this happen on my birthday”, or something.
Oh, and I should have remembered earlier, a local park has the “Solstice Steps”, a wide area of steps and benches by the lakeside, to give good views of the sunset and the like. They’re theoretically lined up especially for the Summer Solstice sunset, but any sense of “lining up” is pretty vague, for a wide stepped hillside.
The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa has the tombstone from the Canadian Unknown soldier. He was originally buried in France, but his remains were repatriated and reburied at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, just across from Parliament Hill.
The tombstone is on display in a small room in the Museum, with a single slit window. At 11 am on November 11, the light from the slit window shines directly on the tombstone.
My house is built along N-S lines, something I found out when I was making a floor-plan of it shortly after I bought it. The front door faces west. The entrance hall has maybe a 20 foot ceiling, with a second-floor dormer directly above the front door. The entrance hall has exits to a home-office on the north, stairs to the second floor, a formal dining room to the south, and a great-room (living room) to the west. The doorway to the great-room has transom windows above it.
I had lived here a few years before I fully retired, so I didn’t know (although I guess I should have) that on an equinox (either one, obviously) at sunset, if it isn’t cloudy, the sun shines through the dormer window, through the great-room doorway and transom windows, then on and through the French-door that exits the great-room to the back porch. The stunning effect only lasts 5 minutes or so, and only for a couple of days at an equinox, but I found it amazing. My wife hasn’t seen it (she still works) and was not impressed when I told her. I suspect she will be once she experiences it.
I think the point is that there are proposals to move all time zones to permanent DST, i.e., move them one hour forward permanently, without a seasonal change back in autumn. Under the current arrangement it doesn’t matter, and wouldn’t even if Arizona observed DST, since November 11 is outside DST even for those states that have it.
We have the same ‘Ray of Light’ effect on Nov 11 at the War Memorial in Melbourne (technically the Shrine of Remembrance). We also have Daylight Saving at that time of the year.
The light comes through a hole in the roof. We just put a mirror in the roof space at the correct angle.
This is astronomical, but not solstice-based. In NYC’s Grand Central Terminal, the ceiling was painted to show the dome of the sky, with all the constellations. They unintentionally got it backwards, copying the stars from a celestial globe. The ceiling’s decorations became nearly invisible from decades of tobacco smoke. When it was cleaned, it was once again visible in all its original, though erroneous, glory. One patch was allowed to remain tobacco-stained, to show the difference. That patch showed the constellation Cancer.
