A House That Turns with the Wind (1974)
On several occasions, I have discussed examples of rotating buildings. Without looking too hard, I remember mentioning the case of Villa Girasole, or the curious rotating solarium in Aix-les-Bains, and even an entire rotating city. But taking the idea of houses that can rotate a step further, I found these two covers. The image on the left is the cover of the May 1974 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine. On the right is the cover of the August 1974 issue of Mecánica Popular (which was, obviously, the Spanish edition of the original American magazine).
The first thing that came to mind when I saw such ingenuity was that it looked as if the nacelle of a giant modern wind turbine had been transformed into a 1970s vacation apartment. Reading the magazine, it becomes clear that it was nothing more than an extravagant but, to a certain extent, interesting idea. It would be a kind of minimalist beach house, raised on a central shaft, capable of rotating 360° like a weather vane to optimally orient itself between the sun and the sea breeze. The idea, as presented in the magazines, was born out of an ambition typical of the time, namely to turn a “second home” into an artifact, almost an engineering toy, but without renouncing an explicit ecological intention. It was emphasized that the goal was to minimize the environmental impact of the complex while allowing it to be oriented by wind or motor, or to remain fixed in a specific direction.
The father of the project was the well-known American architect Charles Ralph Colbert, who took the concept very seriously. It was claimed at the time, in the aftermath of the oil crisis, that Colbert planned to build several such homes on the Florida coast. But, like so many other attractive “crazy ideas,” it never got much further than the drawing board. In the real world, it would not have been easy, especially at that time. It would have required a very strong metal structure, a large-diameter column, a complex rotation system, a well-calculated retention tank and, ultimately, a set of well-calculated devices to create a reliable rotation, with its tolerances, high-strength bearings, brakes, seals against sand and saltpeter, and maintenance that I can’t even imagine how complicated it would have been. Today, building something like this in a practical way would be more feasible than then, thanks to the use of new materials. And that’s where the memory of wind towers comes in, because there are some similarities.
Making the vacation home rotate was not a simple whim or gimmick. The idea was to rotate the house as a means of passive climate control. The aim was to orient the windows towards the breeze to cool the interior naturally, without using air conditioning, and at the same time, it could be used to choose the desired view.
