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.

Last Friday October 30th, BIArch held its first public seminar on the subject of “Energy” in the L’Entresol room of La Pedrera de Caixa Catalunya. The two-day seminar was divided into three sessions. The fist session featured lectures by Julio Martínez Calzón, Principal of MC2 Estudio de Ingeniería; Aleksandar Ivancic , coordinator of energy projects at Barcelona Regional; and a roundtable moderated by Lluís Ortega, partner at F451 Arquitectura, former director of Quaderns and Assistant Professor at the Harvard GSD. The session focused on the tensions between large- and small-scale conceptual and practical or infrastructural approaches to the harnessing and useof energetic resources –or between limits and limitlessness– and the challenges this tension poses to contemporary architectural practice.

Lluís Ortega

After a brief introduction by Agustí Obiol, founding parter of BOMA and BIArch Board of Directors member, Ortega set the tone for the evening by quoting a recent article from Volume magazine that denounces the ease with which the profession has adopted sustainability as a catchword and the subsequent superficiality of most of the debates surrounding energy and architecture. Following this underlying critical thread, the evening’s speakers emphasized the difficulty in grasping the concept of energy in all its complexity and understanding the multiple sides to the phenomena, as well as tracing a solid plan for action in terms of a balanced or efficient exploitation of energy resources.

Julio Martínez Calzón

Martínez Calzón presented an an overarching (practically epic) view on “The Formulation of Energy”, with the intention of establishing the reach of “energy” as a scientific and cosmological macroconcept (much like “matter”). Boasting an incredible synthetic capacity, he enlisted the numerous forms of energy, on both massive and micro scales, controllable and uncontrollable: from supernovae and colliding gallaxies, to monster hydrological projects in China and massive wind and solar power “energy farms” in southern Spain, to rather humble solutions for harnessing power such as photovoltaic balloons and seemingly DIY home geothermal energy kits. His point was clear: we are surrounded a vast array of untapped energy resources. Energy pervades everything: studying energy is studying life.

Alexsandar Ivancic

Bringing things down a notch but maintaining an overarching viewpoint, Aleksandar Ivancic chose a deceptively simple strategy of asking “9 +1 (General) Questions on Energy”. Ivancic’s questions (and answers) shed light on various subjects: the role that political interests (particularly on behalf of fossil-fuel companies) play in deterring radical, large-scale changes in energy policy; the absurdity of hoping that a single technological (magical) solution might revert the negative environmental impact of our current energy resource exploitation schemes, or that technological innovation alone might be the answer to our ongoing energy crises; the high costs of funding and developing alternative models; the slowness of change in dominant energy models and the impossibility of entirely “benign” energy sources. In short, wondering if the problem with energy isn’t really that it’s a scarce resource, but that our technical and social capacities for efficient and balanced use are limited.

Ivancic highlighted the problems with some of the alternatives mentioned by Martínez Calzón, explaining for instance that biomass was fundamentally a “topical” alternative, and it would take the surface equivalent of 3 medium-sized European countries dedicated exclusively to growing “energy crops” to cover around 9% of the continent’s energetic demand, or that providing electricity for Spain through solar power would require photovoltaic farms spanning twice the surface of Barcelona. (And who wants their city burried under photovoltaic umbrellas, anyway?) In the end, Ivancic proposed thinking of which could be the less problematic solution, or the alternative that could better adjust to both our energy and lifestyle requirements and our contemporary landscape conditions.

The roundtable discussion took the problem of scale as a point of departure. Ortega brought up the issue of network infrastructures, digital technologies and the impact they might have on energy models in the near future. Ivancic had declared himself somewhat reluctant to the idea of adopting network strategies in the context of energy infrastructures, but in the end the potential of network infrastructures and mobile technology as a link cross the large and small scales (through processes of decentralization, aggregation and mobility) was recognized. Still, numerous problematic questions remained regarding inequality –particularly in terms of geopolitics– hindering the adoption of more effective energetic strategies; the need for a widespread, informed conscience regarding sustainable practice as a vital compliment to technological advancement; and finally, the long, costly road ahead for the development and deployment of environmentally sound energy technologies, and the exploration of new scales (especially the micro or nano scales).

Next: Reviews of sessions 2 and 3 of BIArch’s “Energy” seminar.

Most of the catchwords associated with early 21st-century “green technologies” are tied to energy: biofuels, carbon neutrality, ecological footprints, microclimates, zero emissions, and so on. Despite the vagueness surrounding it, energy is no passing fad, and it cannot be taken lightly. We’ve seen Sydney turn red under billows of dust, ice caps melt, and entire cities drowned by storms in Southeast Asia and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Droughts and

temperature variations are gradually (radically) affecting entire ecosystems––and human life–around the planet. If the current economic crisis seems like the most pressing issue for architects at the moment, the advancing energy and climate crisis might be the most serious one in the long term.

BIArch’s forthcoming “Energy” seminar will challenge the more superficial and reductive takes on issues surrounding the relationship between architecture and energy, going beyond the limits of the discipline, bringing together a variety of perspectives from fields as diverse as civil and structural engineering, urban design, R+D, and technological innovation, with the purpose of offering a broad, comprehensive view of the what is at stake. The choice of theme was no coincidence: one of the research strands of BIArch’s Masters program is precisely Energy and Building Technologies.

The program for “Energy” also reflects BIArch’s aim of bridging professional practice and academic knowledge. The event will open to the public and will offer valuable insights from active, authoritative figures dealing with the subject of Energy in their everyday professional experiences and environments from different points of view, including conceptual approaches and more tangible notions of policy formulation, construction, building materials and structural design. For further details on the sessions and participants, please download the program for the event here.

BIArch’s activities kicked off with the Advisory Council Meeting earlier this year, under the premise of change in the practice and teaching of architecture in face of continuing economic strife. With “Energy”, BIArch reafirms its determination in generating debate and knowledge around issues that are crucial for the redirection of the profession.