Daniel A. Barber A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 352 pp., 136 illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780199394012 The pages of Daniel A. Barber's A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War literally glisten. The volume's thick, glossy paper, of a type usually reserved for monographs on canonical figures like Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, gives the subject of the postwar solar house a material presence befitting the historical attention it has long deserved but only recently begun to attract. The glare each page casts under overhead light makes the reader feel a bit like a family depicted in one of the book's many revealing archival photographs. A husband, wife, and little boy wear dark sunglasses as they pose for a publicity shot while picnicking on a neat lawn. All around them is the intense shininess produced by a parabolic solar stove kitted out to roast hot dogs and by an expansive solar collector forming the roof of their single-family house—in this case, the fourth experimental demonstration dwelling constructed in the 1950s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as part of its Solar Energy Fund. In the photograph, the family gazes out at a bright, hot “possible future,” to use Barber's term, where the confluence of modern design, renewable energy systems, and the single-family house were seen to hold the twin promise of national energy security and new forms of domestic life. In A House in the Sun we look back at that past's future, but with the hindsight that the highly staged photograph stands as much for a vision unattained as it does for a critical, albeit largely forgotten, episode in the history of modern architecture. The historiography of solar power, such as it is, echoes the discontinuous trajectories of the personalities and technologies that constitute its primary subjects. Since the 1950s, when the engineer Maria Telkes led …