This paper offers an understanding of how solar radiation acts on the various ways we organize our environment and conceive both architecture and urbanism. Our research seeks to put into perspective the various modalities by which exposure to the sun is expressed, present in discourse on architecture and urbanism since the mid-19th century. These forms of expression reveal the various uncertainties in our grasp of light and solar radiation over time – what we refer to as different "sensations of the sun" – and the consequences which these various sensibilities have had on the production of built forms. This gives rise to a history of architecture and urbanism in the sun, which is not an incantation to some supposedly "better" allowance for the sun in the production of buildings, rather an invitation to understand the various ways of reconciling human habitat with a natural element which exerts its physical and symbolic force on all of us.