What Does a Building that Honours the Sun Look Like?

I recently came across a post asking the same question as the title. It lingered with me, sparking curiosity and inspiring this exploration on how we can embrace sunlight as both functional and poetic

The sun has always been more than a source of light. For architects and interior designers, it is both muse and challenge, the ultimate collaborator in shaping space. To “honour the sun” is not simply to brighten a room; it is to enter into a dialogue with its rhythms, its cycles, and its dual character: generous and unforgiving, constant yet ever-changing.

Across civilisations, the sun has been revered as divine order, life-giver, and cosmic clock. Ancient builders embedded its’ cycles into stone: temples aligned with solstices, pyramids calibrated to celestial events, stone circles framing dawn and dusk. These were not aesthetic whims; they were acknowledgments that the built environment exists in service to natural cycles.

Fast forward to today, and the reverence remains, but with new urgency. Sustainability reframes sunlight as resource: free energy, natural comfort, and psychological nourishment. Studies reveal that careful daylighting can cut energy use by up to 80% while improving mood, productivity, and circadian balance. Honouring the sun is no longer symbolic but it is fundamental to designing buildings that work with, not against their environment.

To design with the sun is to choreograph movement, shadow, and heat across time. And this choreography begins long before the first sketch.

The starting point is the sun path! Analyzing how light arcs across the sky at different times of day and throughout the year. From this study emerges orientation, massing, façade strategy, and interior atmosphere. Northern light is diffuse and steady (ideal for studios or classrooms) Southern exposure invites winter warmth but demands summer shading. Eastern light energizes mornings yet risks glare; western light glows but brings punishing heat. These dynamics determine not just where windows go, but how a building lives hour by hour, season by season.

Architects like Tadao Ando show how restraint can make sunlight sacred for example his slotted walls and cross-shaped openings don’t simply admit light, they sculpt it into silence. Glenn Murcutt, by contrast, listens to the Australian sun with featherlight pavilions oriented to catch breezes and temper heat. Each decision reveals a mindset: sunlight is not decoration but structure!

So… How do we honour the sun ???

lets start with Buffer Zones, Transition spaces like verandas, double-skin façades, or screens that filter light before it enters. This is where design meets culture: the mashrabiya in the Middle East, or the Japanese engawa, both balancing shade, privacy, and beauty.

Shading Devices such as fixed fins offer reliability; kinetic panels animate a façade in rhythm with daylight. At Abu Dhabi’s Al Bahr Towers, 2,000 triangular panels bloom and fold with the sun’s movement, merging tradition with technology that not only work with the sun but gives the people who inhabit the space an experience.

Thermal Mass and Material Dialogue - Stone, concrete, or adobe absorb heat by day and release it by night, flattening temperature swings. Even lightweight materials, if oriented thoughtfully, can mimic this performance, as Murcutt’s projects prove.

Natural Ventilation - Tall clerestories aligned with the sun path don’t just draw in light, they pull hot air upward and out, turning sunlight into a driver of air movement.

Once inside, daylight becomes the palette of interior designers. Reflective ceilings bounce light deeper into rooms, material choices alter warmth and glare, and even furniture placement participate in this interaction with the sun.

To see these principles in action, let’s explore a few buildings where sunlight is not just considered, but celebrated as an active partner in design."

Chicago Park District Headquarters, USA (2023)

John Ronan Architects approached this circular building as a study in how form, façade, and sunlight could operate in concert. Instead of relying on flat curtain walls, the perimeter is wrapped in a unitized glazing system of bronze-tinted glass, giving the building a subtle warmth while tempering glare. Over this, curved, expanded metal screens in champagne-anodized aluminum act as solar mediators—filtering Chicago’s intense summer sun while still admitting winter light. These screens don’t just improve energy efficiency; they lend the building a distinctive, almost kinetic texture, catching and releasing light throughout the day.

Inside, courtyards and a glazed skybridge are not decorative insertions but solar strategies, pulling daylight deep into the core and reducing dependence on artificial lighting.

Architects: John Ronan Architects / Area: 7430 m² / Year: 2023. / Photographs:James Florio

Al Bahr Towers, UAE (2012)

In Abu Dhabi’s desert climate, where solar radiation is relentless, Aedas reimagined the traditional mashrabiya as a high-tech, kinetic façade. Instead of static shading, the towers are wrapped in 2,000 triangular fiberglass-coated panels, mounted two meters from the glass curtain wall on an independent frame.

Each panel responds in real time to the sun’s movement. Using a parametric model of solar angles, the design team simulated how the screens would open and close across seasons. At sunrise, the east-facing mashrabiya folds shut; as the sun arcs overhead, vertical bands of panels track its path. By night, the system closes entirely, revealing the bronze-tinted glazing beneath.

The effect is both poetic and pragmatic. The façade reduces solar gain by over 50%, slashing the need for air conditioning, while transforming a skyscraper into a dynamic cultural statement. As Peter Oborn of Aedas put it: “As the sun rises… the mashrabiya along the east of the building will begin to close, and as the sun moves round the building, that whole vertical strip… will move with the sun.”

Here, honouring the sun is not just shading, it’s architecture in dialogue with time itself.

© Aedas

Jacques Chirac International School, France (2024)

In Marseille, Tautem Architecture faced the challenge of intense Mediterranean sunlight. Rather than shielding interiors behind opaque walls, they designed a trellis of flax-fibre composite panels that scatters light into shifting, playful patterns. For the children inside, sunlight becomes not just tolerable but enchanting (a living participant in daily experience.)

The project builds on the concept of a microclimatic envelope, tailored to the Mediterranean climate: a strategy that preserves interior freshness while reducing reliance on mechanical cooling. Every technical and constructive choice, from material selection to panel placement was designed to optimize the building’s financial envelope and minimize maintenance costs, proving that environmental performance and efficiency can coexist with delight and wonder.

Architects: BPA ARCHITECTURE / Area: 5045 m² / Year: 2023

To design with the sun is to accept that architecture is never still. Shadows shift, colors deepen, temperatures fluctuate. A building that honours the sun is alive, evolving every hour, every season.

The task of today’s architects and interior designers is not only to mitigate heat or harvest energy, but to embrace sunlight as narrative and as an active participant in how people live, learn, work, and dream inside their spaces.

Light is not background. It is the story itself.