The Solarship is the Sophab Arch taken to its limit — a curved, glazed shell that wraps an entire home. The house lives inside a warm, sheltered solar envelope, so the sun does the heating and the weather stays outside.
Instead of covering one wall, the Solarship encloses the whole building in the solar-passive arch. The gap between the house and the shell becomes a tempered buffer — warmed by winter sun, shaded in summer, and sheltered from wind, snow and driving rain all year.
The tempered air layer around the home cuts heat loss on every wall and the roof at once — not just the sunny side.
The full arch captures far more winter sun than a single-wall Solarium, doing the most of any Sophab to displace fuel-burning heat.
Wrap a home you already own in free solar heat and it becomes one of the lowest-carbon places to live — no new house required.
Our first at-scale project is being built right now — a full-sized HalfPhab Solarship on a home here in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It's where the parametric design, the engineering set and the real climate meet.
We're also looking for local community projects interested in applying solar-passive technology at this scale — and for partners to help bring it further.
The Solarship uses the same locally fabricated timber ribs and polycarbonate glazing as the smaller Sophabs — just scaled up and engineered for the loads of a full-home span.
It can be paired with earth tubes to pre-temper the air the home breathes, and internal shades to fine-tune summer comfort — a complete solar-passive system.
