Photon International, a German magazine devoted to solar electricity, suggested in a June 2002 editorial, "The PV Engine Stalls," that "another way of spreading the word about solar-photo voltaics is [impressive solar] architecture . . . which can attract new customers with an image of high-tech and status, and possibly even convince usually PV-skeptical architects."

Accordingly, I think it's time for a broad-based architecture and solar technology movement not only to build impressive and beautiful new building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) structures, but also to retrofit a number of the not so architecturally distinguished high-rise and medium-rise buildings left over from the 20th century. They could have tall spires, ziggurats, pyramids, domes and other imaginative structures designed and constructed to support solar-photovoltaic panels and arrays-and, where feasible, also solar-thermal devices and fiber-optic daylighting concentrators and lensing.

I think there is a compelling way to jump-start such a movement, and it would start with a process (embodied in and initiated by a magazine article or dedicated website) that depicts these possibilities with a series of Before photographs of selected large- and medium-scale buildings and After computer-graphic alterations of the same photos.

A Solar Retrofit-Architecture Design Competition could become an effective and interesting encouragement of such design activity, compelling the attention of architects and the public alike. I propose that a major solar-energy or architecture journal consider providing exposure to the idea of a Solar Retrofit-Architecture Design Competition in a major feature article, or series of articles, and that a professional society such as the American Solar Energy Society, International Solar Energy Society and/or American Institute of Architects (the publishers of such magazines) consider acting as the sponsor or co-sponsors of such a design contest.

Photographs of extant buildings in various cities would be presented (perhaps nominated by their PV-interested private owners or public-sector managers-or just selected by the participating architects and solar designers themselves) on these magazine and web pages, upon which images inspired solar architects would digitally create their proposed designs for "solar spires" and other solar-retrofit structures. A collection of numerous images from the same major city would create an image of the prototypical "solar city" gleaming in the sun of the 21st century-the solar century!

The imaginative and inspired design of new architectural elements and features on existing buildings to enable the installation of solar-energy devices (especially photovoltaic panels) will move society more quickly toward renewable distributed energy, and create elements of a more exuberant, elaborate, complex, beautiful new 21st-century architecture in the process.

Using photos of existing buildings underscores the specific idea that retrofit solar architecture should concern itself with the buildings that for many years to come will be the largest part of the built environment: the large structures left over from the 20th century.

Solar architects and architecture students in cities around the world should be invited to look at the buildings around them and imagine how certain structures in their environments might be made more architecturally interesting and beautiful with the addition of structures and modifications to support and facilitate the installation of solar-PV panels. Architects, architecture students and designers would be invited to make photographs of these buildings, and subsequently add to these pictures their proposed elements and features of solar retrofit architecture, creating computer-graphic-modified before-and-after pictures of the treated buildings. They would submit these to the proposed International Solar Retrofit Architecture Design Competition.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this proposal is first and foremost about pictures -- and, in what they might lead to, a lot more.