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Kiel Moe
Kiel Moe, Architecture and Energy in an Age of Open Systems, 29 de noviembre de 2017. Fotografía: Juan Ignacio Palma. Archivo EAEU.
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El paradigma de los sistemas abiertos invierte muchos de los supuestos comunes sobre las implicaciones materiales, políticas y formales de la energía y el medioambiente. La presentación aborda la energética de la arquitectura en el contexto de los sistemas termodinámicos y ecológicos abiertos y, basándose en sus conceptos clave, procura contribuir a la evolución de la relación entre energía y arquitectura hacia un diseño que maximice tanto el poder ecológico de la disciplina y el impacto ambiental del diseño y la construcción como la producción de entropía proyectual.
Open Model
I am engaged in architectural questions about energy, but not from a technocratic, managerial understanding of efficiency or sustainability. We have profound things to learn in architecture from questions of energy, and I want to make the case for open models of design. When I say open, I mean the philosophical, scientific, formal, historical, social, political systems that presuppose any building, what architecture is, how we produce it, and what its potentials are.
Reflex Impulses The models that often govern how we reason and imagine architecture today train us to assume that buildings are isolated objects and acts of design. In doing so, architecture has long externalized consequential topics including the relationship between energy, matter, and form. Rather than an isolated object, architectural form is a reflex of intense impulses of matter and energy across a range of temporal and spatial scales. To understand design in the context of open systems means to reconsider our ways of thinking. Magnificence I have been compelled by the fact that, late in his career, American architectural historian James Ackerman shifted his attention to the role of magnificence, or splendid appearance, as he saw in Palladio’s work. Palladio, for Ackerman, reflects a magnificence in terms of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a speculation on how people might best live and thus design. Ackerman was concerned with the virtue and virtuosity of Palladio’s public works. For me, appearance and the possible magnificence of architecture today necessarily invokes other domains of design. The splendid appearance of a building now implicates not only the outward character of an object, like Palladio’s façades, but also invokes other architectural questions concerning how buildings appear in the world in the most literal, energetic, material terms, such as their planetary modes of production and assembly, their energetic and material flow fields, and how architecture appears to the visual and non-visual sensory apparatus of our bodies.
Appearance
My account of appearance is deceptively a simple question: what causes architecture to appear the way it does today? Since I remain unconvinced and even bored by the dominant fake debate and chronically false choice in architecture that demands that we choose between equally deterministic claims of autonomy on one hand, and autarchy on the other, I am necessarily interested in the seemingly simple question: how else might architecture come to appear today?
Intensive versus Extensive
Extensive properties, such as mass, volu-
me, weight, length, are proportional to the amount of material in a system. These are the traditional variables of design, and the formal virtuosity of design today remains almost exclusively focused on the modulation of extensive properties. Intensive properties, such as temperature, pressure, density, conductivity, colour, are not proportional to the amount of material in a system, and thus introduce degrees of freedom for transformation and the consecution of novel states. Intensive propensities live in buildings by activating duration on energetic gradients, material assemblages, and the politics of the building. The extensive and intensive attributes of architecture are neither binary properties nor do they engender binary readings of architecture. Instead, we must commit to the reciprocities between them. Extensive variation produces no changes of state, while intensive variation can: a basic scientific and philosophical concept about form and transformation.
Conundrum
This framework is not based on geometry or mass. It is not an extensive framework, but results of the intensive understanding of how things transform. Students work with a three-dimensional field of density, air pressure, matter, temperature, but they only have a three-dimensional field. They read the field architecturally and identify principles of organization and form that emerge out of it. This type of pedagogy forces architects to the conundrum of having to draw through thermodynamics.
Models of Coordination
Another topic that comes out of science and is deeply important for architecture today is the coordination of the frames of reference that we use to think about space. Cartesian description is the traditional system of coordination, but it can only recognize fixed objects within fixed frames of reference. Architects remain unwittingly preoccupied with Cartesian coordination, in which no change can occur. This continues to impose basic epistemological and methodological limitations on design, as well as in the politics of design. A second frame of reference include dynamics of time and flow, describing how energy and matter move in reference to a fix boundary. This accounts for flow, but it does not reveal much about formation. There is a third model that involves movement, where all qualities and quantities of the surrounding domain are engaged relative to the moving subject. Any event, sensation, or formation that emerges in the field is coordinated relative to compound movements. In this type of coordination, flow field behaviour is described as following a set of material points through time and space. It describes emergent figures, forms, and transformations that appear in the process. This type of description has been totally unconsidered for the spatial and temporal implications of our traditional understating of form. All three models are relative to my understanding of architecture, and none is taken for granted.
Following Materials
One of the reasons why I did Empire Estate Building was to start thinking about a flow field modelling framework. In the book, I accounted for every single material that ever occurred on the site of the Empire State Building in New York City over the last 200 years. Through the urban morphology, I mapped the material geographies and traced exactly where all the bricks or pieces of steal came from. Following materials is the deleuzian concept that lies in the basis of the work.
Energy
At the University of Florida we map the energy inputs, throughputs, and outputs of a building using an ecosystem method to develop charts that organize the hierarchy of energy. In this type of ecosystem assessment, we can see that 80% of the energy associated with a building is related to its construction and maintenance, and only 20% is operational, like heating, lighting, or cooling. Architects have traditional been obsessed with energy, while the role of construction and maintenance has been unconsidered and
externalized from the spatial and temporal dimensions of the building.
Empire without Rules
The word Empire is an ambitious but apt term for a project focused on the geographic and political forces behind the metabolism of buildings. In this context, every building is an empire, but an empire without rule, because we do not pay attention to it, we do not design it as architects.
State as Politics and Thermodynamics
The word State describes the political apparatus of the geographic unit, but also the macro thermal dynamics of a system. State is both a political and a thermodynamic term. Empire and State allow to think about what a building actually is: not a static object, not a noun, but part of a larger process of urbanization, an active political entity.
Weight and Accumulation
This project was inspired by Fernand Braudel, particularly by his three volumes on the history of capitalism, where he said: It would be best if we could just simply weigh urban systems. This is what I am doing with this project: calculating the weight of all the materials. And it does reveal a lot about the metabolism and politics of what we do. In parallel, there is an influence coming from a small section in Delirious New York, where Rem Koolhaas describes the transformation of the site from a farm to row houses, to a hotel, and finally to the Empire State Building. He describes it as an architecture of cannibalism that accumulates the strength and spirit of material and non-material properties of the building in time. This relates to the ecosystem analysis. The vocabulary is identical.
Persistence and Efficacy If we look at the weight of these buildings, the farmhouse, the row houses, it is interesting that the hotel and the Empire State Building that replaced it have basically the same weight. All we figure out is how to get more people in the same volume or weight. What is useful of urban situations is getting more people, more work, out of a particular parcel of land. But it turns out that the farmhouse and the skyscraper have the same ecological efficacy from that point of view, where other constructions have a completely different order of magnitude. A big part of this has to do with obsolescence, maintenance, and duration. How long a building persists has a big effect on its efficacy.
Extractos de la conferencia de Kiel Moe, con introducción de Santiago Bozzola, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea de la Escuela de Arquitectura y Estudios Urbanos y el Argentina Green Building Council, el 29 de noviembre de 2017.
