[courses]

Solaris: Energy, Excess, Architecture, SCI_Arc

[10.2009]

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1. Thee Solar Anus: The Case for Maximalism
In his seminal essay, The Solar Anus, Georges Bataille described the sun as a heavenly orifice in the sky,  literally shitting light in a constant and unrelenting flow. In the light of its unstoppable luminous fecal expenditure the world grows. This figure is central to his theory of a general economy in which energy and substances intermingle and extinguish themselves without limit and without end, as opposed to a restrictive economy, in which their production and consumption is strictly circumscribed and curtailed.
    Industrial modernity has treated the earth itself as a kind of anus, sucking black fuels out of its pores and greasing temporary empires with it. On the cusp of peak oil and climatic catastrophe, what use is it to argue (and design) for systems of maximum expenditure and of energy systems without limits?
    This research track will examine how capitalist economies of production, utility and profit-reinvestment, 'restricted economies', have contributed to the distortion and destruction of systemic energy systems. We consider how models based on a maximal expenditure can result finally in stronger ecologies.



2. Animal Economies: Biomass and Biofuel
The program calls for a veterinary hospital, and so the building will be filled with humans, with non-human animals of various sizes and species, with medical equipment, with medicines and chemicals, as well as the normal array of institutional infrastructure.  

How can every element in this organic economy be considered as both a potential producer and consumer of energy? How do living and non-living inhabitants differ?  How do they plug-in to the architectural systems?

We look at work in the philosophy of animality (Elizabeth Grosz and Sanford Kwinter) as well as draw upon speculative art and design in in the bioarts and biomedia movements to identify and posit innovative circuits between bodies, buildings and infrastructure.


3. . Energy Cycles: Production into Consumption into Production
An energy producing architecture that is also an energy consuming architecture suggests that every component of the energy/engineering chain must be designed as a polyfunctional component in a cyclical ecology. Cradle to cradle design models are a key conceptual methodology to drive this. 

Any given material form is but an instance in a trajectory of formation, expression, consumption, transformation, re-formation, re-expression, re-consumption, re-transformation, and so on.

Such principles have only begun to touch on architectural thinking. At most designers hope to employ recycled materials. But the ultimate horizon of this perspective is one that could and should radically displace conventional relationships between human and non-human actors within complex spatio-ecological networks. That is, what part of a design system can eat and be eaten? What is at stake the design of large-scale digestion?



4. Grids and Networks, Energy in California
The cycle of production and consumption of energy is predicated on the multi-way mediation of flows. The building is a producer and consumer node in a small local network, feeding it kW, and a larger regional network feeing it mW and feeding kW from it.

In this, the design of the grid on which and into which multiple architectures are embedded is in fact the design of the architectural physiology.

Grids are a multimodal software + hardware platform that include transmission, mediation, realtime monitoring, dynamic econometrics, information visualization, interaction design, and of course site connectivity. What are best cases, limits and prototypes of blending information and energy networks into generative urban scale grids?
    Required reading: Peter Asmus, Introduction to Energy in California: A Guidebook

Tags: branding

Published: 10.07.2009

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