The second session of BIArch’s Energy seminar featured talks by Matthias Schuler, adjunct professor at the Harvard GSD and founder of Transsolar, and Philippe Rahm, principal ofPhilippe Rahm Architects, and was moderated by Juan Gallostra Isern, general director of Barcelona-based Grupo JG. With respect to the prior session, this one was more focused on the practical aspects of energy in terms of design and construction.

Matthias Schuler

Taking his own rich academic background and 17-year experience as an active partner in numerous large-scale architectural projects through Transsolar — a climatic engineering consultancy based in Stuttgart, Munich, and New York that has worked with the likes of Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Stephen Holl, Herzog/de Meuron, Helmut Jahn and Stefan Behnisch, among others — Matthias Schuler reaffirmed the importance of incorporating energetic and environmental considerations as part of the initial project development instead of being added-on in a later stage. Design has to be understood as a collaborative process, and environmental engineers have an important part to play when it comes to building more environmentally sensible structures. By incorporating energy considerations from the start of the project, Schuler’s motto of high quality of life and low environmental footprint becomes a feasible goal.

Schuler mentioned that while in Europe sustainable design seems to respond to moral imperatives, in America it’s caught up due to long-term economic considerations and the positive effects on productivity. Still, given that innovation implies risks, the way one approaches these types of projects is key. Schuler opts for an action-based, trial mode approach, trying out concepts through prototypes and tests. The lofty issues of the prior session where brought down to a practical level of design solutions: insulation, floors, piping, ventilation, reinforcement. Buidlings themselves were presented as systems for energy optimization.

Another key concept in Schuler’s presentation was the focus on cities as a necessary condition to have a positive impact on the environment. According to him, over 60% of the world’s CO2 footprint is generated by urban transportation and buildings. One of the more ambitious projects Transsolar is currently working on is in fact the “carbon neutral” city of Masdar, a project developed with Foster and Partners for Abu Dhabi, which is expected to become a model city housing more than 1500 environmental technology companies and research institutions, and act as a living laboratory for renewable energy systems. Still, Schuler claimed, there is no way that we will ever devise a simple technological answer to our energetic dilemmas: in the end we will need to reconsider our lifestyles and change accordingly.

Philippe Rahm

This point of view was shared by Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, whose work is proposed as a counterpoint to the dominant visual inclination which limits the domain of most practicing architects. Rahm’s projects are developed around another one of the key aspects of space: emptiness. How can architects work on the qualities of the void? Actually, as Rahm described, emptiness only appears to be empty, and is actually full of the unseen: gases, microscopic elements, radiation, and so on. Architects dealing with issues of engergy and sustainability should recognize this fundamental shift in approach and language, away from the visual and towards the invisible.

Rahm proposed thinking of different (immaterial) design elements that could become basic building blocks for architects: heat, humidity, acoustics, light. Through a series of videos and simulations, Rahm illustrated his idea of what an architecture driven by these factors might actually be like. An interesting point that was later brought up in the round of questions is that Rahm focuses more the interior of buildings, instead of dealing with the facades and the urban/infrastructural connective tissue as Schuler had done. Rahm’s more intimist perspective questions the way space caters to everyday life: why should the interior of a house have the same temperature distribution when there are different requirements to the different activities performed in each room? Can’t designing a house be more than designing a shape?

ust like Schuler did in his presentation, Rahm showed a series of provocative installations that reject the idea of energetic considerations being mere accessories to the basic design process of any building. The approaches and sensibilities of the two speakers were quite different, but they seemed to share much more than one might had expected.

We will continue with the third and final session of the Energy seminar in our next post.