Follow-up exhibition of „The City as Energy Landscape“ at HEIA Fribourg in March 2022
The small exhibition promotes the notion of ‘energy landscape’ as a conceptual framework to challenge our current understanding of energy as a cheap and abundant source for architecture. It presents ideas for designing the energy landscapes of the future, taking the greater region of Geneva in Switzerland as its main case study.
While in the last few decades the discipline of architecture was mainly concerned with the self-sufficiency of individual buildings, the exhibition emphasizes the need for a new urban scale for saving energy, which integrates technological systems and natural processes. Such an approach relies on the idea of the productive urban environment, in which the built fabric, topography, soil, bodies of water, green spaces, as well as the urban climate (sun, wind) serve as potential energy sources. In urbanized areas, nature and technology become increasingly intertwined. To conceive the city itself as an energy source requires a new way of architectural thinking, as urban scholar Dean Hawkes emphasized in 1996: “The city that produces all of the energy it needs for its buildings and the urban infrastructure is, of course, only a vision. To take the first steps towards its realization would transform the agenda for research and practice in architecture more radically than any idea since the advent of the modern movement.”
The exhibition highlights aspects of the long-term interest in climate and energy in architecture. In this context and building on the pedagogical approaches as developed at the Accademia di Architettura since 2016, the exhibited material underlines the ambition to bring theory and practice in a fruitful exchange. The platform presented at HEIA-FR represents a synopsis of a larger exhibition shown in Mendrisio in Fall 2020.
Sascha Roesler, Lorenzo Stieger, Lionel Epiney