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The Solar Home Book: Heating, Cooling and Designing with the Sun
Bruce Anderson & Michael Riordan
When it appeared in 1976, The Solar Home Book felt like a manifesto with blueprints. Bruce Anderson and Michael Riordan wrote it at the height of the energy crisis, and it became one of the founding texts of the passive-solar movement: a clear, drawing-filled guide to heating, cooling, and orienting a house so the sun does the work. What sets it apart is its balance of idealism and rigor—real installations, real numbers, and plain explanations of how a building gains, stores, and loses heat, all pitched to an owner-builder rather than an engineer. Decades on, as low-energy design has moved from counterculture to code, the book reads as both a period document and a still-practical primer. For readers interested in sustainable building, the history of the environmental movement, or simply designing with the sun rather than against it, it remains a touchstone.
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The authors
Bruce Anderson became a leading figure in American solar-energy advocacy, while Michael Riordan is a physicist and science historian later known for books on the transistor and the Standard Model. Their pairing gives the book both hands-on practicality and conceptual clarity.
The book
First published in 1976 by Cheshire Books, The Solar Home Book arrived amid the oil shocks as a practical answer to a political problem. It walks the reader through solar geometry, collectors, thermal mass, and passive design, illustrated with photographs of working houses and hundreds of diagrams. This edition carries the Brick House imprint of Andover, Massachusetts, one of several under which the book stayed in print.
How it has aged
The physics is timeless; some hardware is dated. As "green building" became mainstream, the book's core principles were vindicated rather than superseded, which is why it is still cited as a foundational text.
For more context
Pairs with the later New Solar Home Book and with the broad energy-conscious design literature that followed the 1970s.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Bruce Anderson & Michael Riordan
- Publisher
- Brick House Publishing Company
- Place of publication
- Andover, Massachusetts
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Craft & How-to
- Location
- Maine