Rather impressive, but genuinely simple. He maximized sunlight in the winter while minimising it in the summer and increased the buildings connection to the earth below frost level where the ground stays a constant 14C/57F year round.
My dad built the house I grew up in like this in the mid 70's. Big south facing windows with large overhang. Brick wall sucks up the heat for the night. Our greenhouse had huge 20ft high cylinders filled with dyed black water. Worked great.
What happened in the 80s and 90s to make this not as popular?
Passive solar used to be the way everyone built... at least before way back with the Ancient Greeks and Chinese. But when we stopped relying on sun for energy, most of us stopped building this way.
I would guess passive solar gained popularity in the seventies due to more attention to energy conservation (oil crisis and all) and then when oil got cheap again, it wasn't so trendy. Hope that's not that case now.
Though cheap oil and global warming aside, I'd still prefer to live in a home heated by the sun and cooled by the earth. AC gives me a headache and I much prefer the feel of sun through a window than the blast of central heating.
