Hampton Avery Architects

In Memory of Senator Edward M. Kennedy

“As I have traveled the this nation this year, I have discovered that despite the sense of hopelessness and helpless frustration that too often dominates the energy debate in Washington, there is a revolution of Yankee ingenuity changing the energy future of local communities.”

- Senator Edward M. Kennedy

September 1980

From the Introduction to “Passive Solar Energy: The Homeowners Guide to Natural Heating and Cooling” (1981) by Bruce Anderson and Malcolm Wells, Publisher: Brick House (click the link for a free download).

The Senator then goes on to cite examples of some of that ingenuity: increased gasohol production, solar water heaters installed in the Tennessee Valley, citizens turning to wood stoves to heat their homes, an MIT house that would employ meltable salts to store and release heat with only small changes in temperature.

Okay, so some of these are, admittedly, somewhat dated and not exactly standard operating procedure, but I defy you to pick up a ‘green’ themed magazine that doesn’t feature either these very strategies or their contemporary descendants.

I myself have become a Passive House Certified consultant - a standard that grew out visits to the U.S. Midwest made by German scientists in the early 1980’s who toured the same off-the-grid super-insulated homes Sen. Kennedy was writing about and probably visited.

The point is, at a crucial point in our nation when things were about to turn in a different direction (think of the solar panels Jimmy Carter put on the White House being taken down in 1982 by the Reagan Administration for fears that America might look weak), a government official was not only moderately well-versed in the ways people were trying to improve things, that official was also willing to lend support to a movement and some technologies that still needed testing and wider application, and recognized we as a country needed to begin to travel the path toward a pursuit of energy independence.

Our hats are off to Senator Kennedy on the day of his passing.

We’ll do our best to continue along that path he helped illuminate.