In the news today: MIT researchers may have finally found an effective way to combine a solar panel and a window. This could be huge.

The technology works like this: Dyes are strategically cast into glass so as to refract certain parts of the spectrum along/within the glass rather than allowing it to pass through. All this redirected light then shines out the edges of the panel in a high concentration. By simply placing narrow solar panels around the edges of the glass, the amount of expensive solar paneling is minimized without sacrificing the amount of solar radiation “caught”.

And then, of course, there’s the additional benefit that this is a window. Not a normal window, but a tinted one. So it is a little unconventional, but let’s consider some of the possibilities of this:

• What if we built a greenhouse entirely out of these windows (walls and ceiling) and allowed the dyes to use just the blue/yellow part of the spectrum to send to the solar panels? Remember, yellow and blue makes green, and that’s the part that plants don’t use. The green that we see when we look at a leaf is essentially the “waste” part of the light. So you’d have a solar array that doubles as a greenhouse. The windows would appear red to us.
• Next idea: for a human space, what about just the opposite. After all, we like the greenish light that filters down through a forest canopy to our level. Again, “free” solar power on top of this pleasant effect.
• Here’s a crazy one: what about custom-tinted skylights to complement the colors of a room? If you’ve spent much time inside of churches with stained glass windows, you know that these colored windows can have a huge effect on the feeling of colors that receive the light … almost like a way of engineering emotions. This could be a whole new discipline within the field of decorating/design.

Why “mis-named”?

Because cupola means a dome, kind of like a cup that has been turned over on the top of a roof. When is the last time you saw a house with a domed cupola on its roof. Please send me a picture if you have.

The fact is that 99.9% of residential cupolas aren’t cupolas at all. But at some point, I guess history must to allow the cupola definition to expand, even if it’s the opposite of the original meaning. It’s like what noted linguist K.D. Harrison says: There’s really no such thing as bad grammar in an adult, since the only way we have of defining the grammar for a particular micro-culture is to look at how the adults in that culture use words. If they use words in contradictory ways, it’s interesting, not incorrect.

Why Medieval?

Based on the fact that the Italians, where the word used for our modern “cupolas” originated, didn’t get involved in dome-building until after 1000 AD, it’s safe to assume this wasn’t used residentially until the High Middle Ages.

Why a “Budget Lookout”?

Because you wouldn’t need to put a cupola at the peak of a roof if you could afford to build a stone tower to keep tabs on your fiefdom.

Learn more about this fascinating architectural feature by watching my cupola video.

Thanks to the internet, self-educated homeowner-remodelers are getting more and more sophisticated.

In fact, thanks to the high velocity of change in the construction industry and the ease with which things can be researched (if you know what you’re doing), a homeowner can go into a meeting with a GC (general contractor) knowing more about some narrow topics than the GC does. (more…)

Remodel do-it-yourselfers tend to have a “Don’t mess with the roofline unless necessary” mentality.

And for good reason!

If you can avoid “opening up” the roof — thereby taking the risk of getting rain directly into your home — why not do it?

Also, altering the roofline of a home can be intimidating from a framing perspective. The roof has angles, so naturally (more…)