Kayen Montes. Total Electric.

TOTAL ELECTRIC the spatial possibilities in the

materialization of energy

kayen montes

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we need to talk

about electricity.

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FOREWORD 1 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univ.

Press, 2007), 64.

This work originates from the realisation that electricity is on its way to becoming the sole and universal energy standard. The research stems precisely from the unease and perplexity that this realisation produced, how strange this energy language still is for most, and how little awareness we have of the matter’s life cycle.

Electricity is an elusive subject matter, one that has been discovered, referred to and described in various ways during the last centuries; this is a topic sometimes spatial, but many times it is an abstraction; there are many electricit[ies], and they will be discussed from different angles. For this reason, the work is not linear; it is anachronical, as it works its way around the subject in an effort to describe its edges rather than its core, doing so through a series of perspectives instead of encouraging a definitive definition. Much like Bruno Latour’s Actant-Network Theory, electricity is considered an actant without pre-given, fixed entities with inherent characteristics or properties. Instead, it is defined by its relations within a network (assemblage). 1 This makes the actant’s identity fluctuate as its role within a network becomes contingent upon its interaction and association with other fluctuating actants in the system.

Therefore, this project is about the subjectification of electricity, shifting the perspective away from a human-centred one, attempting to understand the vitality and agency of this energy force first, and only then looking at the notions it subscribed to us, its users.

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CONTENTS 04 - 20

INTRODUCTION & OTHERS SECTION I : CAPITAL ENERGY

37 - 44 47 - 56

PART I: GENEALOGY OF AN ECONOMY ASSEMBLAGES ELECTRIC FETICHES PART II: MORE LIGHT, MORE POWER! ST JAMES PALL MALL SHOREDITCH POWER PLANT

62 - 73

DESIGN I: BREATHING BATTERIES

23 - 27 29 - 33

SECTION II: WARZONE

95 - 107

PART I: WAY OF WAYS

GRIDS & URBAN MODELS PART II: PROGRESS & FEAR STEADY AND BEAUTIFUL

110 - 131

DESIGN II: LIVING OF THE GRID

77 - 90

SECTION III: POWER & DESIRE 133 - 136

PART I: A PROCESS OF ASSIMILATION AMBER FASCINATIONS

141 - 151 153 - 181

PART I: A PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION PRIVATE ENERGY REGULATING DESIRED SPACE

182 - 225

DESIGN III: ENERGY DOES NOT FLOW IN CABLES BIBLIOGRAPHY & OTHERS

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ABSTRACT FIG 01-04 Stills from the advertisement film ‘The Total Electric Home’ by Westinghouse Productions, c.1950

The Total Electric Project investigates the moments of intersection between dwelling standardisation and electricity management in the household. Moreover, it analyses how, through its adoption as the ultimate energetic language, electricity created a symbiotic relationship with its users by domesticating them and their surroundings. The thesis is interested in the socio-economical roots of this energy form and the psychological implications that its project has had on its subjects.

Accordingly, it investigates the subject matter from an architectural and social engineering perspective, as it perceives the spread of the electric network as the built manifestation of a perpetual process of social fragmentation produced as part of a modernisation project, since the dawn of industrial capitalism.

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The project claims that the keys to alternative habitation modes, to that of the Western nuclear family, are hidden within a systemic transformation of the electric network. The central aim of the thesis is to interpret the effect these transformations could have on the built environment, and to move away from the palimpsest of social structures built upon the linear economic system that was the modern electric project. To achieve this, the research then focuses on the evolution of housing in London’s metropolitan context; by reviewing the regulatory process of space and electricity, it aims to uncover how this energy form was introduced and domesticated into our homes.

The Total Electric project provokes the interpretation of architecture as the material organisation that regulates energy flows, currently bringing order through architectural and technological devices, but also inseparably, to see architecture as an energetic organisation that upholds material forms. In the re-definition of this last relationship lies the underlying opportunity to transform the tripartite relation between users, energy, and architecture.

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INTRODUCTION

“The present form of the metropolis owes its appearance primarily to the economic form of capitalist imperialism.”2 FIG 34 (opposite) ELECTRICS Magazine East London Supplement 1930. p.5

2 Ludwig Hilberseimer, Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays, Columbia University GSAPP Sourcebooks 2 (New York: GSAPP Books, 2012), 86.

Progress and civilisation have often been employed as synonyms, as humans’ constant pursuit of reaching ‘forward’ into new horizons. The need to always look towards the bigger, the higher, the faster, and the forever lasting have produced bodies that push their limits, accomplishing feats that previous generations always imagined impossible. Many of these obsessions have had a direct correlation with the development of human’s ability to domesticate energetic artificial resources, which initially were external (apparently) to them but became symbiotically interdependent with the bodies they were serving and the space they, in turn, occupy.

The Total Electric project deals with the spatial consequences of energy, concerned with it in the form of electricity. On how it was domesticated and how, through its adoption as the unique universal energetic language, it has domesticated its users and their domestic habitat.

It seeks to problematise a paradox embedded in the electricit[ies] of harvest, distribution and, in particular, storage. Since it observes that engrained in the devel9

opment of the electric system lies the paradoxical human ambition to control the distribution – the storing and releasing of energy – contradicting the proposed conditions of the laws of thermodynamics,3 which state that energy in any form is utilised to its fullest when in constant flux – in a state of continuous transformation.

In contrast, its storage and conservation in any form is ultimately a futile and wasteful process.

This paradox becomes particularly problematic in the current transition to the global renewable energy strategy that humanity is embarking on4. Therefore, the research challenges the energetic paradox derived from market-driven rituals that promote the need for its commodification, conceptualising electricity as a byword for capital – one that demands the [re]production of subjectivities that are driven towards escalating and progressive consumption. This allegory is flawed in its current state; it needs to be calibrated towards a biologically efficient5 one, away from its economic agency.

As an exercise guided by the need to understand electricity’s genesis – in what regards the modern human – the thesis questions the established notions around the electric grid, particularly from an urban metropolitan context, but to comprehend its various histories, we will look at the primal human-electric connections, as well as the experiments that led to our current perception of this force. To establish an urban and architectural point of reference, the urban context of London will be used as a case study, employing a typological analysis of social housing examples in the period between 1875 and 19266 - in ‘architectural-energetic’ terms, this period could be related to Lewis Mumford’s “neotechnic” period of architecture, to the moment in which we can observe architecture adjusting to the incursion of electricity into human’s life.

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Through Section I, the thesis will then aim to define the critical properties of the subject it deals with. Electricity is then understood philosophically as the complete ‘assemblage’ of parts constituting the ‘network’. It is considered a vibrant matter – alive. From power plants to transmission lines, operators, and power meters, the network is understood as a net of constantly communicating entities. The research will therefore determine that an agency is embedded in this network that currently functions only from a human perspective. Thus, the question is open towards new agencies that could come into play if and when the perspective shifts to an assemblage-oriented one.

3 Elaborated through Lord Kalvin’s memoirs, quoted from Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy, Writing Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 50. Moreover, the contribution of the German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who elaborated the universal law of the conservation of energy in 1847. Arguing that the forces of nature (mechanical, electrical, chemical, and so forth) are forms of a single, universal energy, or Kraft, that cannot be either added to or destroyed, from Hermann von Helmholtz, “Uber die Wechselwirkung der Naturkrafte und die darauf Beziiglichen neuesten Ermittelungen der Physik,” [1854] Populiire wissenschaftliche Vortriige, 2d ed., vol. 1 (Braunschweig, 1876), p. 115.

4 Seen here as a market-driven attempt to mitigate a global ecologic an ultimately economic crisis - through the repetition of existing linear ways by hinging on chemical and mineral practices of energetic storage to reduce the uncertainty of unpredictable [natural] ‘supply driven’3 energy sources.

Moreover, electricity is framed as a commodity in Marx’s7 terms. First and foremost, this commodity needs to be appreciated through their “theological niceties” to contextualise the mystical veil around what otherwise could be understood as a naturally obtained energy force, which responds to the laws of physics and, most importantly, the laws of human economics. This fetishisation will become an essential aspect in analysing the social project that took place at the beginning of the 20th century, where the electric project will meet and address specific shortfalls in its system through the indoctrination of the population it was to serve.

5 The notion of energetic efficiency is redefined in the context of this work.

The harvest, transportation, and use of electric energy will not be measured in terms of the efficiency of available consumption in relation to the effort of its production or storage, for instance.

The work intends to challenge the notion of energy as a pure and total abstract form. It understands its production as a constant process of transformation, making it impossible to separate the action of production from its user. Therefore, efficiency becomes a measure of the capacity to harvest energy as s product of transformation, not of loss.

6 The starting point will be taken from the publication of the 1875 Public Health Act, considered throughout

The Total Electric project seeks to foster alternative social structures around this rather abstract economic issue, electricity. It does this by denouncing the sum of electricit[ies] as complex assemblages – from the lithium mine to the certified-refurbished iPhone – and will try to propose a series of parallel electric heterotopic urban scenarios. These scenarios will be embedded in but not driven by liberal markets, hijacking the remnants of the capitalist city to create alternate realities where care and common energy are the norms.

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The project is inserted in the British context, to be more precise, the urban context of London. It is interested in the intersection of legislative phenomena from the mid and end of the 19th century, such as the 1890 Housing of the Working-Class Act up to the Addison Act of 1919, where norms and standards begin to be applied, through state-led mechanisms, to the built domestic spaces of the city as well as the civic characters that would inhabit them8. Simultaneously, electricity as a technology championed to address matters of production, hygiene and control makes its way into the same space, albeit it is introduced as an entrepreneurial activity than a democratic humanistic endeavour, where regulation comes at the turn of the century. This work tells electric stories about different ‘electricities’ that occupy our world. A series of histories (case studies) are formulated on the encounter between electric energies and built space to deconstruct the current relationship between both. Particularly interested in the palimpsest of decisions that led to the current ‘inefficient’9 models.

It is suspicious that this study could enable the re-configuration of the energetic built environment to revisit the tecno-chronological history between architecture and its electric elements.

The financial venture that is the electrification of the city of London is analysed throughout Section II, where the system’s mutations are evidenced as it struggles to become a viable and profitable endeavour. The solution, a social one, will prove to have impacts on the civic character and the built environment equally, as the centralisation of production will dictate a model of a city, and uneven access to power. On the other hand, the subject in need of such power is engineered. Furthermore, the electric grid is studied as it becomes a pervasive surveillance machine, one that becomes a monitoring and regulating tool over the individuals it serves. As an overarching technology that reaches all of humanity in one way or the other, the development of its grid is studied and contextualised as the economic venture it was, up to the enforcing apparatus it has become.

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the study, as a point of reference in regard to the health standards to which architecture and urbanism became upheld. As a symbolic end to this ongoing research, the year 1926 is suggested. The reason for it is that this was the year in which the National Grid as an encompassing ‘British’ project was established and up and running, spreading the network parameters throughout the territories it influenced.

7 As seen through Chapter 1 of Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, V. 1: Penguin Classics (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981).

8 John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (London Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018), 11.

Finally, Section III will focus on the correlation between individuality as a notion embedded in the economic equation that the electric project pushes forward.

The family unit becomes an indispensable measuring element, and the single-family house will give form to such a unit. Programme and space become inseparably tied with the energy devices that serve them. The kitchen, stove, and fireplace become elements which will define one unit from the other and gradually become abstracted end-points of the electric grid; they will clearly indicate where public property ends and where private starts.

Additionally, the project turns its sight to London to study the housing regulations, which were instrumental in constructing the British persona. Energy management intersects the acute regulation of working-class housing within the household by the State. This intersection will become evident in critical components that compose the typical house and its users. Walls, stoves, sockets, and fireplaces designate specific forms of living that will take place in these spaces. Thus, their regulation becomes critical in defining the subjects and their ways of living and understanding space.

Lastly, by focusing on dwelling as the central unit of study, it proposes a series of spatial-use re-configurations using daily ritual transformations, questioning what the complete technification of architecture10 means. Abandoning the current canonical symbolic understanding of architectural devices, arguing that in this re-configuration lies an opportunity to impulse the collectivisation of some aspects of architecture and moments within the energy network. Moving away from for-profit models of progress and development through social infrastructures could branch out from this alternative relationship/significance to our energetic dependency.

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AIMS

QUESTIONS

To propose an alternative understanding of the role of energy in our daily routines. Through the genealogic study of electricity’s incursion into the built environment, be able to separate the human/social constructs from those inherent to the energy source. In this way, the project intends to be able to propose architectural designs that will shift away from the currently economically dogmatic understanding of energy.

How can the re-interpretation of an energy source, such as electricity, become a transformational tool of the built environment?

Assuming true the imminent energy transformation the city will endure in the next 100 years, the project sees an opportunity to exploit electricity as a medium of unexplored chance for social and spatial transformation.

Rather than approaching a linear optimisation of existing energetic models, the project intends to propose typological solutions triggered through procedures of collectivisation of a combination of energy and architectural elements.

How was architecture instrumentalised in contributing to the expansion of electricity as a universal form of energy?

How effective could the promotion of the collectivisation of a combination of elements from the electric infrastructural network and those from the architectural domain be? How can this operation help alleviate the energetic anxiety in the contemporary and future London metropolis?

The thesis aims to propose alternative habitation models, using the urban context of London as a case study, employing a typological analysis of social housing examples in the period between 1875 and 1926 to produce design briefs that answer with the same systematic techniques.

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NOTE ON STRUCTURE

9 In-efficient here is to be understood through the notions brought forward before (see pt. 3)… not as something technocratically perfectible, but towards the understanding that there are is no linear ‘total electric energy’ but a series of them, in constant transformation, from which energy is continuously harvested and used.

Although the dissertation intends to construct a genealogy of electricity’s histories concerning human use, the work is not organised chronologically. On the contrary, in order to be clear about the [believed] role of an author in building such a work, the subjectivity of the author is explicitly put forward in the structuring of the sections through a selection of ‘particular moments in the grid’s history, life and location.

A linear reading of the work is most certainly possible.

However, each section is intended to be a short story about a particular aspect of the electric force. Therefore, the sections are structured with an initial element [part] which frames the section’s theoretical or critical aspect that will be discussed throughout; following a pertinent case study to that first part is analysed, this case study is freed from what is ultimately the geographical site of interest which is London11. Moreover, the sections present a second part, which will deal with a case study located explicitly in the context of London or directly involved with the construction of electricity as a force in the urban context. Finally, each section is framed with a design exercise which operates as an architectural conclusion for each section.

Moreover, the book presents a possible reading of the critical aspects of the research that are colour coded (yellow) throughout the work. These represent the instrumental facets intended to build up the argument by the author.

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Total Electric aims to investigate a series of moments within the electric network and explore spatial opportunities it suspects possible if not for the social constructs that have been built by technologies that came before an since the electric era.

SECTION I

CAPITAL ENERGY

PART I

GENEALOGY OF AN ECONOMY

FIG 10 (previous, opposite) Market Promises - an attempt to diagram a global energy grid.

OMA/AMO, WWF - The Energy Report, 2011

ASSEMBLAGES

Energy has tremendously influenced architecture.

Ever since, humans gathered around a fire pit for warmth, protection or ritual. The eventual retreat of fire from the domestic setting (other than the stove) has severed that innate human-fire relation. Through this severance, an abstraction occurred, transforming all the qualities of this power source into a strict collective exchange of commodities.

Through this severance, though, two things happened. One could be discussed acts on the affectual ground, the established relationship between a source of power, a measurable, tangible one, a collective experience in its making even, was dispersed into an array of sub-activities that stemmed from this new form of energy. From the rituals around a hearth, through the ones around the radio to an isolated (yet not lonely) interaction with phone screens, we can still trace a form of gathering around an energy source. The other, and ultimately the one this thesis is concerned with from a spatial perspective, is how this abstraction (the way energy is produced and distributed) completely removed the ‘combusting’ moment that was inherently linked to the space it served. Energy is no longer produced in the home but taken far away, and alternative intermediary agents (coal, gas, electric) transform themselves into the required force or service.

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There has been, especially in the moments of energy management that this thesis works with, what is referred to as a modern agenda where the construct of these abstracted energy sources has been deeply objectified and distinctly separated from the human realm. They almost transformed it into an economic equation, where humans or their space cannot hold. The fact is that energy became an inert material object which could be dealt only with specific tools. Enter complex infrastructural distribution and production systems. These systems have an endpoint, a consuming point, which ultimately inhabits and defines the domestic.

However, we could opt to observe electricity not as an inert and passive object but, instead, as actively participating in shaping the world in which we live. Electricity has this potential if we consider it ‘vibrant’12, alive, and uphold our interest/added value to these non-human elements to the same standards as the human ones.

Electricity has an agency of its own, becoming an active agent that shapes our lives. In her book “Vibrant Matter,” Jane Bennett explores the concept of “assemblages”13 and how it relates to electricity—arguing that electricity is a prime example of an assemblage, a collection of heterogeneous elements that act together as a unified whole. Through this lens, Bennett examines the relationship between humans and non-human entities in the production and distribution of electricity, as well as the political and social implications of these processes.

Assemblages are not static or fixed but rather dynamic and contingent, composed of various elements that act together to produce effects in the world. Assemblages can, and in this case, they must [!] include both human and non-human entities, and they can change over time as new elements are added or removed. In the case of electricity, the production and distribution of electricity involve a complex assemblage, such as power plants, transmission lines, transformers, and power meters. These entities do not act in isolation; instead, they work together to produce the effects of electricity in the world.

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10 Here the word ‘technification’ is used rather lightly. As the intention is not to use it in a technological progressive manner, but rather as an exercise where the cultural symbolic conception of a wall for example is abandoned in order to address its optimization in energetic efficiency standards.

11 This is done in such a way in order to be able to reel in certain influential events, notions, and developments which greatly impacted the subject-matter and, due to methodological impositions would otherwise be left behind or barely mentioned.

12 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

13 Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, the author will give agency to a collection, a multiplicity of human-nonhuman assemblages workgroup that construct the subject matter, electricity.

Assemblages are not just passive objects; they have agency and the capacity to act and impact the world.

This agency is not limited to humans but can also be found in non-human entities, such as electricity. Understanding the agency of assemblages can help us to recognise the interconnectedness of humans and non-human entities and to work towards more sustainable and equitable systems. By recognising the agency of non-human entities, we can see them as active participants and consider their perspectives in our decision-making processes. Moreover, in this read-and-rereading exercise of human and non-human needs, we could find an energy retrofitting exercise and transform previously inert terminals into active points of production and storage. Recognising assemblage agency can help us question the assumptions and biases underlying our current energy systems. For example, we may assume that electricity is a purely human invention and that non-human entities, such as power plants or transmission lines, are passive objects.

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Jane Bennet asks us to question the impact of considering electricity not as a simple resource, a commodity, but as an actant14, a whole new aspect of this energy source unfolds. Spatially, this is no different; if we consider how energy (primarily in the form of electricity currently and in the future) is managed within the household, we see it simply as an output of a quantifiable commodity, $ for work. We operate as terminals and endpoints in a vast energy network. However, the opportunity is there to see every single energetic transformation that occurs in the household as part of fluid (constant) ‘combusting’ moments, where energy is not just electric and is not just consumed but produced and harvested simultaneously.

Finally, by utilising the same geographic context of Bennett’s work , we will examine the conditions in which the first hydroelectric generating plants were developed in the following section15. In doing so, we can identify the way in which the depiction of these as distant, detached objects from the human experience became pivotal to their application as a full-blown energy distribution system.

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14 Bennett, Vibrant Matter.

15 See: ‘Grids and Urban Models’ Section II, Part I.

ELECTRIC FETICHES

FIG 11 Market Promises OMA/AMO, WWF - The Energy Report, 2011

Through this work, electricity is utilised as an allegory for capitalist development after the Second Era of the Industrial Revolution. It is seen as an exemplary industry, machinery with which a capitalist project was developed across urban, social and political aspects of life.

Therefore, the work will be read through the lens of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’ (particularly Volume I) as a reflection of the institutionalisation of an economic system that was settling in rapidly in the north-western countries, particularly England. Contemporary to Marx’s writing, a new force was developing at various scales. Electric power was being harvested in small batteries for domestic purposes, tested on human bodies to cure ailments, and, most importantly, developed as a possible solution to illuminate the growing urban settlements around Europe.

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As stated in the chapter before, electricity is understood immediately by its early developers as an entrepreneurial activity, and therefore it becomes a commodified force. Regardless of the force’s precedence, whether natural (hydro) or an already humanly brokered one (such as coal), this energy source was required to have some level of human labour inscribed into it.

Therefore, it is considered a marketable commodity. In Part I of Capital Volume I, Marx calls commodities out “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”16 bringing forward the question about how commodities were fetishised by the classical economy, mystified to hide specific values that are crucial to its distribution and to make the profitable overall. At its core, capitalism fetishism refers17 to how we imbue material objects and economic systems with mystical significance. Rather than seeing commodities and financial relationships as mere tools to achieve certain ends, we treat them as possessing inherent value and power.

The electric commodity emerges under specific social relations that, in their totality, provide the conditions for the existence of the commodity. As we will see in the following chapters, these social relations are pursued, designed mainly by those developing the technology and flattening the topography for this force to spread out. In the case of electricity, these conditions (as the ones Marx described for the capitalist venture) need to exist in a state of mass production and simultaneously present a certain degree of alienated labour that will make the system, as a whole, profitable. The electric output will ensure all of these, under the vail that the technology, the machine in itself, is exploited by optimising its design and efficiency. However, the disguised factors and the alienation, in this case, become apparent only if we think of the constellation of individuals and actors involved in this production, the effect that this production has on the environment where its remnants are spread 30

out, the working conditions it allows or disallows by its mere presence, and of course the entire urbanisations it modifies, establishing a controlled scenario for its own distribution.

FIG 13 An early attempt into an ‘Electric Vehicle’ C.J. Wharton, Domestic Electricity for Amateurs, 1885, p.212 FIG 12 Flyer from the British Electrical Development Association. c.1923, London

16 Marx, Capital, 48.

17 Marx, 50.

18 One has only to read WWF and AMO/OMA’s Energy Report, to see how the image of an eternally connected world is sought and calculated for.

Electricity, although one of the most mathematically abstract energy forms in place (without tangible flow or any other measurable parameter other than its loss and optimisation), is constantly comprehended as something more than a mere tool. Our reverence for electricity can obscure its true nature. At its core, electricity is simply the flow of charged particles through a conductor. It is a fundamental physical phenomenon that can be harnessed for various purposes, but it is not inherently good or bad, powerful or weak. Yet we often treat electricity as a magical power that can solve all our [future?] problems. [This is too descriptive, engage with the mystification that has occurred so far, link with section III] This understanding of electricity parallels how we fetishise any marketable object. We are awed by the power of electricity to light our homes, power our devices, and run our factories. We marvel at the sight of massive transmission lines stretching across the countryside and are grateful for electricity’s convenience and comfort. And there is a sense that there is no other world than an electrical world as we look into the future18.

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This is particularly true nowadays if we consider how the ‘Total Electric’ solution is sought and elevated as some ultimate solution to the energy-production-induced climate crisis. We must only think about an ‘electric car’ as an instance. It is true; the car IS electric. However, in the constellation of components that bring to ‘life’ these vehicles, it is closer to being a ‘chemical’ car than a purely electric one, maybe even closer to being still petrol dependent car if we analyse the line of production of such a product and its parts19. As often as we overlook the true nature of the electricit[ies] out there, we overlook capitalism’s fundamentals. We fetishise the market and the accumulation of wealth, seeing them as ends in themselves rather than means to achieve a greater good, whereas the same could be seen to happen to energy and electricity, for that matter. Both are inherently critical systems to create/impulse modern urban life, profoundly impacting Western society and culture. By exploring the ways in which electricity and capitalism function as allegories for one another, we can gain a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between economics and technology.

In the same way, Marx invites us, somehow paradoxically, to first understand commodities through their “theological niceties”, as one must, to criticise a religion, first discover and understand the religious dimensions of everyday social life20. To critically understand the elusive subject matter , the electric grid and its urban implications, we must first understand the veils and the mechanisms introduced into it.

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19 Martín Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020), 37.

20 Slavoj Zizek, Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason, video, 2006, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=SsFC3FuuRV.

SECTION I

CAPITAL ENERGY

PART I I

MORE LIGHT, MORE POWER!

ST JAMES PALL MALL

FIG 14 Shoreditch Electric Power Station.

Source Unknown

FIG 15 Responsabilities, rates and controlling enteties of the electric project in the United Kingdom Electric Act 1882’, accessed 18 October 2022, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/Vict/45-46/56/enacted.

21 ‘Electric Act 1882’, accessed 18 October 2022, https://www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/45-46/56/enacted.

22 ‘Electric Act 1882’, 16.

London. Electricity materialised as a law in 188221.

The city became the canvas on which this revolutionary, yet strange energy would spread. As public space was [is?] a contended element in this context, the Act’s primary target was the definition of public space and how it could take it over to disseminate around the urbe.

“The expression “street “ includes any square, court, alley, highway, lane, road, thoroughfare, or public passage, or place, within the area in which the undertakers are authorised to supply electricity by this Act or any license, order, or special Act.”22. Furthermore, private and public became defined as well, one hinging on the other “Private purposes” shall include any purposes 37

St James Pall Mall

London Electrical Councils in 1881, St James Pall Mall, at their centre.

0

2km

Pall Mall Electric Plant

Within the effective radius of transmition from the Pall Mall Plant, we have the patrons and

St James' Park

clients of this endeavor:

1890s

Arthur's Club Army & Navy Club Ambassadors Court Alhenaeum Club Albany Court Boodles Club Beaconsfield Club Brookes Club Orleans Club Cocoa Tree Club Conservative Club Clion Club Devonshire Club Fentons Hotel Guards Club Herries & Farguar Howell & James Hotel Continental Junior Carllon Club Junior Army & Navy Club Junior Constitutional club Junior Army & Navy Stores Londond Joint Stock Bank London House London & Westminster Bank Lloyds Bank Marlborough Club Magistrales Club New University Club Norfolk House Oxford & Cambridge Club Royal Exchange Association Reform Club Raleigh Club

200 yards

Salisbury Club St. James' Church St James Hall St James Restaurant Spencer House

300 yards

Senior U.S. Club Travellers Club

0

Thatched House Club Vestry Hall Windham Club

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41

20m

(previous spread, opposite) St James Pall Mall Power Station and its original benefactors, private clubs in the vecinity Redrawn from the Engineer Jounral, Setpt. 5th 1890

0

5m

23 ‘Electric Act 1882’, 2.

24 ‘Metropolis Gas Act 1860’, accessed 11 November 2022, https://api. parliament.uk/historic-hansard/acts/ metropolis-gas-act-1860.

25 See points 20 through 22 of the ‘Electric Act 1882’.

26 After one or two accidents, word spread out about the dangers implied in meddling with this system. Geoffrey Newman and Adrian Forty, A Survey of Design in Britain 1915-1939, Repr, History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939 Units 19-20 (London: Open University, 1980), 60.

27 Authorized individual or company to provide electricity under the rules estimated by the Board of Trade and/or the individual councils which ultimately answered to this same entity.

28 St James & Pall Mall Electric Light Co., ‘Electric Lighting in London’, The Engineer, 3 September 1890, 8.

whatever to which electricity may for the time apply, not being public purposes…”23. This spatial contention was crucial for making the electric project viable, as at the time, the energy source was mainly unknown by the general public; for the project to expand, it would be first necessary to regulate it under law and test, and then expand it. The 1882 Act (and its subsequent amendments) was modelled after the Metropolis Gas Act of 1860,24 an act which, in essence, was a financial rulebook that, until amended in 1868, ensured the monopoly of gas and coke companies, hinging on the fact that the development of such projects was much more ‘fluid’ when under a single entity’s ruling. Similarly, from the 37 points that the 1882 Act has, nearly two-thirds are destined to determine the financing rules, loan rates and returns, securities and or the electric rates to charge the clients. Rights were inscribed for the entrepreneurs, the councils, and the city’s properties.

The provision of electricity became the desired standard, where even if the line in place was not commissioned or in use, it had rights over those whom it was currently serving “Any person who unlawfully and maliciously cuts or injures any electric line or work with the intent to cut off any supply of electricity shall be guilty of a felony and be liable to be kept in penal servitude”25.

Electricity had the right to exist and to be functional.

Electricity’s purpose literally became to give light and security to the city’s darkest corners. It became a critical tool for this purpose as the public ignorance about its operation meant that there was little to no ‘public’ control over it26 – it became a power exclusively controlled by the ‘Undertakers’27.

This desire was inspired by the early examples we can see appear early after the Act was initiated. At the epicentre of the Electric Project in London, we find St James & Pall Mall power plant. This case study became a testing ground for all the sections of the legislation, an exemplary project from which many were modelled after that28. This project, maybe not by chance, was a 43

financial endeavour carried out by a combination of the parish of St James, Westminster, and a group of private clubs which it was primarily to serve29. Its goal was to provide electric street lighting to the parish30, church, and internal electric lighting for a series of gentlemen’s clubs. The plant was located in a courtyard off Duke St., consisting of a building of three stories, constructed of white brick (completely fireproof31 throughout), standing exempt from its surrounding structures. 32 Albeit the combustion that took place in this plant was grimy and messy, namely the handling of, burning and disposal of coal, the plant was built up as a new urban object, a white object. Its playful façade was emblematic, accentuating an ‘unnecessary’ architectural feature – given the pragmatism of the use of this building – which further highlights the notion surrounding this new technology ‘this is a new clean and the outmost desired standard of energy’. Embedding a contradicting invitation to be admired but being a complete hermetic structure, jealously keeping the machinery in its interior.

It is uncertain exactly when it started working (c.1885), but what is certain is that the Salisbury Club was its first customer, and that only after a year, more or less, it was already serving 110 customers, feeding the equivalent of 6000 amperes33. Light was available from 9 am through 2 am. The rest of the time, complete and utter darkness.

As we can observe in the graphs, electricity, began to create a precise representation of human activities in those contexts. As a tool, it became the standard measurement of these activities, almost with a live feed, as meters would virtually immediately share that information with the company. The system presents an unparalleled optimisation opportunity stemming from and retrofitting the electrical network.

44

29 The connotation added here has to do with the fact that the combination of these two ‘types’ of entities that come together is probably the target that the Act of ’82 had as an ideal. A morally unimpeachable institution to provide guidance and to which provide energy in itself, and a combination of entrepreneurs interested in the development of the technology in itself.

30 Used here as a unit of administration used for local government. It is a territorial designation which acted as the lowest tier of local government.

31 St James & Pall Mall Electric Light Co., ‘Electric Lighting in London’, 9.

32 Being exempt is explained by its authors as a fire safety measure, but it nonetheless allows the building to become a singular object, which can be admired in itself. Maybe unsurprisingly, today it operates as a “the White Cube Mason’s Yard”.

33 St James & Pall Mall Electric Light Co., ‘Electric Lighting in London’, 11.

SHOREDITCH POWER PLANT diagram of refuse collection

hackney refuse collection energy produced

FIG 16 Diagram of Refuse Collection Redrawn from the Combination of Dust Destructors and Electrictity Works Economically Considered

by W.P. Adams, 1901

tons

units (kW)

900

72000

800

64000

700

54000

600

48000

500

40000

400

32000

300

24000

200

16000

100

8000

june

july

august sept.

oct.

nov.

dec.

january febr. march

april

may

On a more utilitarian side, the electric project was treated with less aesthetic appeal, and was envisioned to address specific urgent social and urban issues. The Shoreditch Municipal Electricity and Dust Destruction Undertaking (SEDD) were a ‘first’ given the implemented technology, which we will discuss below. Still, most importantly, it was the first example of a Vestry (as a municipal entity) actively preventing a monopoly on electricity supply from a private company and exploring the bureaucratic steps to achieve this.

FIG 17 The borough of Shoreditch’s sigil or coat of arms.

Hackney History Dept. 2009. p38

Following the 1888 (amendment) Electric Act, three companies applied for licences to supply the electricity in Shoreditch. This presented the vestry with a challenge: electricity could be handed over to the private sector, which would take the commercial risks and, if 47

St Leonard - Shoredictch Plant

London Electrical Councils in 1881, St Leonards in its perifery

0

2km

34 Borough of Shoreditch & Shoreditch Vestry, ‘Combined Electricity & Dust Destruction Undertaking’, 1897, 17, Tower Hamlets Archive.

35 Hackney Archives Department, Hackney History (London: Premier Print Group, 2009), 13.

36 H. Prearman, Excellent Accommodation: The First Hundred Years of the Industrial Dwelling Society (1885) (Watson, 1985).

37 Hackney Archives Department, Hackney History, 12.

38 Prearman, Excellent Accommodation: The First Hundred Years of the Industrial Dwelling Society (1885), 81–84.

0

50m

(opposite) Shoreditch Plant & Baths Plan and energy distribution diagram, from coal to steam to electric and hygene.

Redrawn from “The Combination of Dust Destructors and Electricity Works”

successful, the profits; alternatively, the new power could be exploited by the municipality for the public good. The parish councillors thoroughly examined the possibilities and issued a study to be carried out, one that balanced the populations’ demands and the available power needs of the neighbourhood34. The decision only then was taken to move forward with the financial endeavour and the moral infrastructure that followed.35

“If gigantic and tyrannical trusts monopolising the production and use of electrical power are not to dominate our children as the railway companies dominate us, we must see that the community secures at the outset effective and systematic control over the new force.” 36 In the 1890s, the Shoreditch vestry had the problem of disposing of 20,000 tons of municipal refuse37 yearly.

This was barged, via the Regent’s Canal, for dumping at sea. With this scenario, Shoreditch’s chief electrical engineer claimed that “the public benefit derived from the only perfect method of disposing of garbage, namely by burning, is so great that its actual value seems incalculable”38. The vestry commissioned a consulting engineer to conduct a feasibility study in the abovementioned study. A scheme was devised: a refuse destructor and a combined heat and power system which would burn refuse to produce electricity and provide hot water for an adjacent public bath.

51

39 A fact that becomes relevant as the whole Borough was recognizably an industrial ‘zone’. Borough of Shoreditch & Shoreditch Vestry, ‘Combined Electricity & Dust Destruction Undertaking’, 5.

0

50m

The project itself consisted of, on the one hand, the central electric station, which worked by steam supplied by the ‘destructor cells. These cells were oriented specifically to household refuse39. On the other hand, public baths and washhouses were built alongside the project, and these were fed by the remnants of the combustion that occurred in the power plant. Moreover, the site is counted with a public library and a museum. The building was erected in the industrial fashion of construction, a highly optimised combined structure consisting of brick walls and steel trusses to cover the great lights between walls. Accordingly, the whole structure was inserted into the existing fabric (the washhouse actually occupied an existing building), there was no architectural highlight other than the infrastructural chimney, but this one merged seamlessly against the skyline of other chimneys the area presented.

(opposite) Shoreditch Plant & Baths Section and energy distribution diagram, from coal to steam to electric and hygene.

Redrawn from “The Combination of Dust Destructors and Electricity Works”

By W.P. Adams, 1904

53

0

100m

1902

kilowatts 1000 900 800 700

coal-generated electricity

600 refuse-generated electricity

500 400 300 200 100

12 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10

11

12 1

2

3

4

5

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11 12

Although the project introduces a notion not seen up until this moment, namely the fact that energy is produced, harvested, and appreciated as a cascading combustion process, the appreciation for the otherwise remnant caloric residue produced, creates a conscious notion of a process, abstracted to a certain point, yes, but with a reflection in the process. Moreover, the actual interaction of the bodies through what would be almost an industrial service of cleansing, reinforces this direct connection and awareness of the process in which one is involved through this action. The fact remains, however, that morality and the standards of the modern hygienic man were inscribed into this project. A designed human was envisioned to ‘emerge’ from this project, where it would be cleansed, exposed to the mechanical feat that was the machinery, and alternatively introduced into a [extremely noisy and vibrating] library. Furthermore [to be developed more], the scheme of provision of electric light was evidently suggestive of the commercial zones that were reinforced, and the new urban standards that were ‘showcased’ by these urban lines.

56

FIG 18 Electric production diagram redrawn from the Combination of Dust Destructors and Electrictity Works Economically Considered

by W.P. Adams, 1901

DESIGN I

BREATHING BATTERIES

AN URBAN IMAGINARY 58

59

40 The Edison Electric Company, ‘The Edison Electric System: Light and Power’ (Coleman St, 1881), Johnson Philips Technical Library.

41 Benjamin Park, The Intellectual Rise in Electricity: A History (New York: J. Wiley, 1898).

42 Herbert Robson, The ‘A B C’ of Domestic Electricity, 1st ed. (London: Henry J. Drane, NA).

43 Other than, of course, the points of consumption such as public lights or office buildings that are let lit up in global metropolis such as London or New York, in order to build on the imaginary of the forever awake city.

Bromley-by-Bow Gassworks

Bethnal Green Gass Holder Station

Poplar Riverside Gasworks

Bow Common Gasworks

The analogy of electricity and natural elements such as water or gas is present in many European electricity manuals in the last decades of the 19th century.40 41 42 Perceiving energy as flowing matter made understanding this new invisible subject matter a more straightforward exercise. Adopting the tangible characteristics of another power source, such as the kinetic flow of water or the atmospheric pressure that can be obtained by compressing a gas, became a go-to-exercise for those trying to explain the benefits of the new abstracted force that is electricity. The examples used concepts such as gravity and pressure to eco with the units of Watt, horsepower, etc. The power was tied with familiar tangible elements. This was especially effective, as one could observe visible objects throughout the city that would indicate the production, storage, and production of a particular form of energy. These objects were a visible aspect of the urban form, from gasholders to steaming plants.

However, when looking at the electric city, these tangible moments disappear. As production, deemed through the mid-20th century as unhealthy and contaminating, is pushed further away from the urban centres, the city is emptied of ‘telling’ infrastructures, moments, and markers that inform any aspect of the electric chain.43 The connection with the electric grid becomes more abstracted as each of these elements is moved away; a conscious attitude towards consumption is hindered by the ‘distance’ laid between the points of production or storage and the daily routines of the citizens. Passive capturing objects appear to spread out as solar panels invade roofs, and all sorts of electric promises seduce us into imagining architectures that will be materialised through energy-capturing technologies (i.e., ‘breathing’ concretes, solar tiles, etc.). However, the image is still energy neutral.

The project intends to bridge that missing link. It becomes an attempt to exhibit and give corporeality to this force which drives our day-to-day. It is the anthropomor-

60

61

Bethnal Green Gass Holder Station

62

63

Introduction of programme to infrastructures in desuse.

light screen

solar panels

water pressure storge

existing structure

water pumps

pond water exit public access

public acce openings

park

mound

0

proposed energy devices

64

50m

0

proposed scheme

65

50m

Bethnal Green Gass Holder Station - proposed

66

67

phising of an infrastructural device at the scale of the city. Something between a mechanical ventilator and a lung, if you will. These devices reflect on the different faces and infrastructure objects can have, both in terms of their actual function and what their presence means in spatial terms. Breathing Batteries are envisioned as a temporal intervention in the current temporal setting.

They are intended to bridge the current perspectives of citizens with those in the future. Induce this link between citizens and energy structures employing contemplation on a daily basis of the ‘act’ of an electrified city. They become a part of the urban backdrop.

The design takes over, in this case, decommissioned infrastructures in the gasholder category. As many of them are constantly being romanticised into the exterior shells of speculative domestic architectures, the aim, in this case, is to romanticise their possible [precious] function. An action that would connect their current intended purpose with the one in which they were devised, where what is subverted is their economic functions.

Rather than becoming ‘holders’ of capital, they become buffers of energy. A function is triggered by the systems within which this device is created. They depend on an intranet of cooperation to function as desired. The system can work as long as it becomes part of a local production and energy distribution network. Otherwise, it loses its essence and becomes a battery, and what the project seeks is to become a capacitor at the scale of the neighbourhood.

The city’s skyline becomes a diffuse one, blurred as its ‘lungs’ oscillate up and down during the course of the day, resonating with the population’s imagination on how energy is constantly in flux.

68

69

SECTION II

WARZONE

PART I

WAY OF WAYS 70

GRIDS & URBAN MODELS

FIG 19 (previous, opposite) The National Grid The Electric Times, 1929

The modernisation process of the urban centres during the second half of the 19th century had nothing to do with law, regulation or diplomacy. There were, yes, overarching attempts to organise and spatially codify the city, even define it as it is still currently understood, urbanisation44. However, one might argue that the most deterministic movements were not strictly spatial or even on the surface but underground in the form of infrastructure networks. As Keller Easterling puts it, “…these spatial, infrastructural technologies [spread] often because market promotions or prevailing political ideologies lubricate their movement through the world.”45 These machines, by excellence, are assemblages of humans and no humans alike.

FIG 20-21 The Grid materializes on the streets and in the houses identically.

44 Ross Exo Adams, ‘Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: Ecological Urbanism, Circulation, and the Immunization of Nature’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1 (February 2014): 12–29, https://doi.org/10.1068/ d17012.

45 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London; New York: Verso, 2014), 14.

46 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: BasicBooks, 1990).

Furthermore, as these machines spread through urban and non-urban alike, a quid pro quo structure develops with them. Organisation, modernisation and then globalisation provide constant optimisation with the banners of better human life conditions through the 19th and 20th centuries. However, they create a new type of human through the power they provide. Anson Rabinbach46 describes the inevitable competition that develops between humans and machines; when inscribed in a production-oriented capitalist system, steam machines offer a new standard of production, one that can only position their organic counterparts as lacking energy or producing capacity. The universal spreading of powers such as electricity or clean water distribution in urban centres is no different. These will determine, for example, longer days with a certain quality of light or a particular health standard that becomes the norm.

73

Moreover, once the link is established, a standard is consensually reached between machine and human alike, and these machines become existential for society; this is when we can attest to the subordinating power that assemblages have over the population they serve. In the case of the electric power grid, in the term coined by Agamben47, it becomes a pervasive surveillance apparatus that allows them to monitor and regulate individuals’ movements and activities in previously impossible ways. This new form of power, disguised behind a façade of service, becomes one that can operate through control and management rather than the evident policing or coercions seen up to their appearance.

The alternate current (AC) electric distribution system has become a critical component of the capitalist system, serving as the backbone of modern society.

However, how it has been developed and implemented reveals a deep-seated connection to capitalist endeavours. The system predominated over others, such as direct current transmission (DC), not because it presented safer conditions or less energy loss overall but because it offered the best-optimised way to carry a centralised and steady production out and distributed. Of course, the steadiness of this production is what was sought, highly depending on a marketable human experience, whether coal, gas or nuclear powers. Additionally, the AC distribution system is highly centralised, with control over electricity generation, distribution, and pricing in the hands of a few large corporations. As a system, it demands the standardisation of all it is purposed to serve, transforming the individuals and architectures it serves.

74

47 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).a 48 In the work by Francis Haveron, or anywhere else is not really specified when and where these encounters has a place, but given the dates, it could be interesting to assume that this happened in the first weeks of the Paris Electrical Exhibition of 1881, which run through that same summer.

49 Francis Haveron, A Brilliant Ray, 1st Edition (The Godalming Electricity Centenary Celebrations Committee, 1981), 15.

FIG 22 Electric’s Lightings ‘firsts’, the Town of Godalming.

The Graphic 21st November 1881

When examining electricity as a new urban power source, the decade of the 1880s is an exciting fragment of history—a decade of firsts.

In the summer of ’81, in the English town of Godalming, engineers from the company providing light to the city, encounter the electric developments of the Siemens company, a DC motor48. By September of the same year, the financial structures had already been agreed upon, and Goldaming would become a testing hub for this new technology. Harvesting water from the little49 river Wey, the endeavour, would distribute a closed circuit of direct current (DC) power that would power three arc lamps in the town’s centre. Becoming the first example of urban lighting in the British context. The Daily Telegraph on the 30th of September 1881 read: 75

“…the end of the despotic sway of gas. It has been reserved for little Godalming to turn its river, the slender and rippling Wey, into a piece of Machinery, and set it, just like any other mechanical servant to the task of lighting its streets […] generating electricity, which is stored in the daytime is used at night for the purpose of driving that dull anachronism, gas, out of place [which] is to be illuminated by the brilliant ray of the electric vibration.”50 On the German front, intense tests were being carried out around the possibilities of long-distance electricity distribution. In 1882, as the International Exhibition of Electricity in Munich was about to begin, a steam engine was turned on 60km from it, and a power line was electrified, providing DC power to the German Empire’s stand.

Paradoxically, the object powered on the stand would be an artificial waterfall, an ironic effort to mock the natural forces that would later be harvested. This would become the first long-distance successful transmission of DC recorded; however, in the eyes of the entrepreneurs of the time, something did not work in the equation as the total voltage of the transmission was 2000V, 2.5 kW, meaning about 1.25 amperes, which in essence meant that the power was insufficient for any ‘useful’ apparatus (i.e. arc lamps) other than communications. Entering the new decade, closing the ‘achievements’ of the ‘80s decade, the International Electrotechnical Exhibition took place in Frankfurt ’91. Similar to the previous example, an alternator was positioned, this time in Lauffen and 175km from where the exhibition took place; lamps ignited this time. The system, however, was a three-faced AC one, functioning at its best at 25000v (once stepped by transformer stations), providing an estimate of 75% efficiency51 from the initial point to the delivery one.

76

adams station - hydro-turbine 1896 redrawn from Cassiers Magazine

500 horse power generator

from Lake Erie

wheel pit

propeller

50 Haveron, 8.

51 Silvanus Thomson, Polyphase Electric Currents and Alternate Current Motors (London: Finsbury Technical Manuals, 1895), 23.

0

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Adams Plant - Niagara Falls - 1895 redrawn from Cassiers Magazine

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Adams Plant - Niagara Falls - 1895 redrawn from Cassiers Magazine

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Proving to the capitalist of the moment, looking to consolidate profitable initiatives, this was the direction to take when producing this new force. A central point distributes, and whoever controls this point controls the production of all the tangents that stem out of it.

DC power plant

(opposite)

Buffalo Town Centre, 1890s

DC transmition lines

redrawn from Cassiers Magazine

In the USA, the much-covered battle of currents is at its pinnacle. The distribution of AC vs DC electric power correlates directly with two different urban visions.52 The electrification of North America began in urban areas with high levels of economic activity and population density. Initially, electric companies competed for service within localised areas. During this period, the business community and the public generally favoured electrification. Monopoly became widely accepted as more efficient than competition as the way to develop and grow the capital-intensive electric industry. However, large and small cities across America faced a critical choice: public or private ownership?

The example of the Adams Power (Starting design in 1885, completed 1895), built over Niagara Falls near Buffalo, became a quintessential example of an AC polyphase hydroelectric plant. The impact of such a power plant on the adjacent town and its territory was dual. On the one hand, the urbe becomes mechanised, as we can observe in the section of the ducts that run under the Niagara Falls town, from the plant to the lower area of the waterfalls. The power plants installed borrow the right-to-pass underneath the entire city. The geographical conditions in which this town was placed both enabled and required the plant to excavate in such a way, but the private endeavour encroaches silently into the fabric above. On the other hand, the distribution of power through AC from this plant meant, on a regional scale, the possibility of having access to this clean power, favouring the reproduction of a particular desirable living standard throughout the region’s population. Furthermore, the same could be said of the distribution at a territorial scale; as we can observe on the State’s maps, the distribution possibilities for this 82

52 Arthur Vaughan Abbott, ‘Industrial Niagara’, Electrical Engineer (USA), 1895.

0

2.5 km

energy source were indeed overwhelming, meaning that this model, from a single source, from a single owning entity, could be extrapolated pass any geographical or societal different that it might encounter.

Moreover, as the city was populated with different systems of distributions, namely AC and DC alike53, we can observe how the scales of these systems dictate the possibilities of expansion of one over the other about their generating sources. One can read the implementation of AC power as a deeply rooted economic strategy, not a humane one, as it hinges heavily on the economic benefits of the system’s structure rather than questioning its impact. And one can extrapolate, from a capitalist perspective, where a monopolisation of the system was preferred over a subdivided one to accelerate the financial actions of such a heavy capital-dependant industry as energy production. AC’s capacity to escape scale limitations for its long-distance transmission capabilities allows for this massive concentration of power production in a single point. It requires/ensures a sole distribution system for whoever wants to connect to this grid.

53 In this case this becomes a representation of the ‘Battle of Currents’ state at the moment, the personalities of this conflict met in the context of Buffalo, represented on the one hand by the Edison Electric Company and on the other Westinghouse & Co. See Vaughan Abbott.

(opposite)

Buffalo Town Centre, 1890s redrawn from Cassiers Magazine

84

AC transformer station AC transmition lines

0

2.5 km

lake ontario

lake erie

adams plant - niagara falls - 1895 redrawn from Cassiers Magazine

0

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If the urbanisation of the second part of the 19th century is an effort to ‘save mankind from its present state of crisis’, the grid becomes its decisive tool. One exemplary case study of such a ‘courageous’ attempt is the work by Idelfons Cerda (Teoría General de la Urbanizacion, 1867), where, as Exo Adams discusses54, a critical feature is embedded into these infrastructural grids. These grids, streets, intervias, and ‘network of ways’ as Cerda will refer to them, are how state/extra-state apparatuses55 become ‘free’ to access every point of the now so-interconnected net. This network becomes an example of capital’s obsession with softness and efficiency, the constant quest to create the perfect physical condition for [whichever] commodity’s exchange, where ultimately, the suppression of heterogeneity and the global standardisation of space becomes necessary. Here lies the true project for expanding such networks, as they affect human lives and are driven by such. Therefore, the Total Electric project constructs a civic and urban character to develop the grid forever until we are left with a ‘single, unified human population’ – a global community with exact needs.

88

FIG 23 Pearl Street Power Plant area of influence/service in Lower Manhattan, New York c. 1880s.

Source N/A

54 Adams, ‘Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata’, 17.

55 Seen here, as a combination of institutional subject-designing efforts, or in Agamben’s terms, as spaces of reach from an institutional point to a private/domestic one.

SECTION II

WARZONE

PART I

PROGRESS & FEAR 90

91

STEADY & BEAUTIFUL

FIG. 24 (previous, oppostie) The Battle of Powers C.J. Wharton, Domestic Electricity for Amateurs, 1885, p.212

London, Kensington, 1890. One has only to take a quick look at the graph provided by the Kensington Court Power Station over 24 hours, to understand that the engineers, producers, financers and speculators of the time had a crucial problem in the new up-and-coming business, the generation of electric power. Hidden between the two lines (the thick and the thin ones represent a mid-autumn day and a mid-winter day, respectively) hides something that all these actors were desperately trying to solve in their ledgers, drawing books and equations, namely, how to turn a business which had such a curvature difference in its consumer segment, become steady and profitable overall, when its optimal economic condition was constant production? In other words, how to reduce the risk of such a fragile investment, in a technology in mid-development which still had a lot to prove (safety, consistency, reliability, etc.)?

56 ‘Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (JIEE)’ XXIV (1895)

92

One of the answers to this problem is bluntly proposed by Colonel Crompton in a speech56 given to the Institute of Electrical Engineers (1895) when discussing the coming year’s goals and objectives as an industry: 93

57 ‘Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (JIEE)’.p.10 58 Many historical facts are taken here from Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire, 2002nd ed. (New York: Thames Hudson, 2002), 182-206. Who in turn sources historical facts from H.H. Ballin’s book ‘The Organisation of Electricity Supply in Great Britain, 1946, a source we share in common too.

59 Leslie Hannah, Electricity Before Nationalisation. A Study of the Development of the Electricity Supply Industry in Britain to 1948 (The Economic Journal 89, 1979).

60 For further context, in the year 2006, the United Kingdom reached its peak it terms of electricity consumption around (add data), the load factor of the National Grid at the time (of combined sources) was 45%.

61 Forty, Objects of Desire, 184.

FIG 25 Kensington Court Power Station, over 24 hours.

Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, vol cvi, 1891

94

“We not only desire to have the output of our generation station more evenly distributed throughout the 24-hour day, to fill up the valleys and reduce the peaks of our daily diagram […] the great disparity will always exist so long as the major part of the energy we supply is for lighting purposes, and the obvious remedy is to encourage its use for motive power and heating and cooking; and to me, at present, it appears a far easier matter to educate the public to the advantages of using electricity for heating than to induce them to use motive power to any considerable extent.”57 In its initial moments of development, electricity is mainly utilised for public or private lighting. This limited production generated severe economic problems, especially for those on the production side of things, as power plants needed to be dimensioned (both physically, technically and financially) to have the capability to supply electric power at the ‘peaks’ of demand. Leaving, in this case, the powerhouses idle during most parts of the day, as the light was less or not needed at all58. To contextualise this issue, from a financial point of view, the efficiency of the Kensington Power Plan (FIG XX) was about 13% annually59, meaning that the plant was idle at 87% of its operational capability60. This became an urgent matter; there was a loophole where the high costs of electricity would make it inaccessible for domestic use – where gas or coal proved to be cheaper and demand less capital investment from the user’s perspective – but fixating on an electric light or even motor use (such as trams, trains, etc.) would still prove inefficient because all of these examples would more or less overlap, simply deepening the ‘valleys’ between consumption and lack thereof. Forty notes: “Had the industry ever developed a satisfactory method of storing electricity generated outside the peak hours, the uneven demand would not have been a problem.”61 This a statement with which I agree in principle, but object as there have been ample examples of storage solutions, contemporary and previous to the development of electricity.

95

62 As no more than 6% of the housing fabric in the Great Britian had electric wiring, and less than 15% of the remaining would be able to logically afford the upfront capital cost.

63 See Section III, Part III of this work.

The only plausible economical solution was a social engineering project that would construct a civic subject.

This urban character would depend on electric devices daily to satisfy their inner moral desire to be modern [?].

Although nowadays this seems straightforward, at the time, many sectors rejected some electricit(ies) such as forms of lighting, as they were ‘too stringent for the eyes, blinding even’. Therefore, the subjectification process, became a comprehensive one. One that included companies, state institutions and individuals, that guided the population they served through advertisement, the legislature acts and architecture.

As people returned to England after fighting in France through Europe’s First War, electric companies found themselves in a tight spot. They had been steadily producing energy for the war efforts, a prosperous time that provided stability in their business. But as the war ended, it returned to the sloping curves that oscillated between demand and idleness62. Simultaneously, the government faced a grave housing shortage, which triggered studies for the correct development of a new model of houses that would serve and foment the new modern family.

FIG 26 (opposite) British Electrical Developing Association advertisement in The Architect, 1929

The Housing and Town Planning Act 1919 (the Addison Act) became a pivotal point in promoting local authority involvement in the supply and management of housing in England. With the help of national subsidies, that Act obliged local authorities to build houses to meet local housing needs. More importantly, it became a unique opportunity to regulate how and what energy was used in these new dwelling types63. To execute this transformation, within the Addison Act, a section gave birth to the British Development Association (EDA), a sort of executive branch of the corporate electric lobby in current terms, an institution whose sole purpose was the expansion of electricity’s overall market, starting with the domestic sphere.

97

The EDA was founded in 191964 as an industry body to promote the use and development of electricity in the United Kingdom. Its focus was on the domestic market, where it aimed precisely to increase demand for electricity by encouraging the installation of electric appliances in the home. Particularly in the context of London, the EDA played a significant role in the development of electricity in domestic architecture. The EDA promoted installing electric appliances, such as electric cookers, refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners, in homes across London. It did this through advertisement, exhibitions and ‘showrooms’.

Architecturally, the EDA ensured homes were designed and built to accommodate the increasing electricity demand. It provided advice and guidance on installing trial systems in new homes, and worked with architects and builders to incorporate electrical systems into building design. One notable example of the EDA’s influence on domestic architecture is the development of the all-electric home. In the 1920s, the EDA collaborated with architects and builders to design homes that could be powered entirely by electricity, from heating and lighting to cooking and refrigeration.

These homes were promoted as the future of domestic architecture, and helped to drive demand for electric appliances and electrical systems in homes. From the clunky ‘Battersea Electric Kitchen’ exhibited in 1927 to the holistically designed ‘All Electric Home’ of the late ‘30s was a model home that showcased the latest innovations in electrical technology and was designed to inspire homeowners to incorporate these features into their own homes. This seemed to deal with the issue of internal wiring and distribution within the household from the point of view of planning officers. However, still by the year 193965, although two-thirds of the houses in the UK had an electric meter, therefore possible connection, most of them had only lighting installations or even just a single 5amp socket which the unit would share to use multiple appliances during the day.

98

FIG 27 War Lamps Arc-lamps funded and developed for the United States Army.

From D.P. Heap, Report on the International Exhibition of Electricit, 1883

FIG 29 The Electric Breakfast M. Lancaster, Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning, etc., 1914

FIG 28 War Lamp-Vehicles War demmands constant energy deployment.

From D.P. Heap, Report on the International Exhibition of Electricit, 1883

64 Same year as the Addison Act of 1919, which Parliament passed and through which it would ensure government subsidies to help finance the construction of 500,000 houses within three years.

65 Fifty years after Colonel Crompton’s speech.

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“Electricity…makes a most valuable servant when put to do useful work. In its capacity as a servant, it is always at hand; always willing to do its allotted task and do it perfectly silently, swiftly and without the mess; it never asks for a rise; in fact, it is often willing to work for less money; and never gives notice and foes not mind working overtime; it has no prejudices and is prepared to undertake any duties for which it is adapted’ it costs nothing when it is not actually doing useful work. Such are the merits of the housewife’s new ally….”66 Moreover, the EDA played an important psychological role, as electricity was seen, in many cases, as a dangerous obscure force, an invisible one that people did not fully comprehend. Therefore, in order to foment its utilisation, it was vital to work on the public’s appreciation of the powerful force. Here’s where the Modern Project meets the Total Electric one, where the desire for a clean, healthy society overlaps with a force that, through the abstraction of its manufacturing, was able to provide power in many forms to its end users without leaving a trace of ever having been there (if one avoids acknowledging the vast amounts of infrastructure involved in the matter).

FIG 31 1/3 Coal Layout Report on the Use of Electricity in Working-Class Dwellings.

BEDA. Blair Imrie & Angell 1921

FIG 30 Kensington Court Power Station, over 24 hours.

Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, vol cvi, 1891

66 M. Lancaster, Electric Cooking, Heating, Cleaning, Etc, A Manual of Electricity in Service of the Home (London, 1914), 8.

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FIG 32 2/3 Gas Layout Report on the Use of Electricity in Working-Class Dwellings.

BEDA. Blair Imrie & Angell 1921

Energy Layouts.

Projective analysis by the research team from the Addison Act of 1919. A poly-energy model is described, where the possibility for the installation of the new power could be developed seemlessly into the existing layout.

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FIG 33 3/3 Electric Layout Report on the Use of Electricity in Working-Class Dwellings.

BEDA. Blair Imrie & Angell 1921

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The Total Electric project was just as Colonel Crompton instigated, not so much a technocratic one, but rather a social one, an indoctrination one. The house was surely mechanised; by introducing electricity’s wires, breakers, and sockets, a wall stopped being just a wall, but became instrumental to other functions, as the positions of these sockets in relation to this architectural element started a dialogue. However, what was genuinely mechanised, was the subject. The public became educated and moralised by the modernising agenda, desire for a new standard of living was planted deep into these subjects’ minds.

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DESIGN II

LIVING OF THE GRID

RECLAIMING LOST SPACE 106

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67 Comité Invisible, ed., The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 1 (Los Angeles, CA : Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by The MIT Press, 2009), 110–12.

400kV to 275kV 275kV to 132kV 33kV to 11kV

north london

London Electric Grid redrawn from the Open Infrastructure Map (August London’s Electric2022) Supply Grid redrawn from the Open Infrastructure Map

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Infrastructural nodes have been removed from the cityscape. They have become highly secured, militarised protected zones. In the case of the electric network, these points are dangerous in themselves, but even more dangerous is their nodal condition to affect the functionality of the grid they serve. As the Invisible Committee states: “To sabotage the social machine with some consequence today means re-conquering and reinventing the means of interrupting its networks.

How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?”67. These barren lands have become the nodal moments of interruption that could collapse the seamless working condition of the city. But in every electric node, where a confluence of energy occurs, losses are abundant as energy is transformed, divided, compressed, or distributed. These are all necessary functions-actions of the grid, which in turn have present a marginal energy by-product loss on each of them – which the next design will take advantage of.

Transformed stations occupy such a space. Originally, designed and placed depending on their scale and efficiency concerning the security and position they occupy regarding the rest of the grid. Therefore, the project will take advantage of the systematic distribution of these ‘moments on the grid’ to propose a systematic project: depending on a particular coefficient of inefficiency and located in an isolated peri-urban condition.

A structure grows surrounding the transformers. This structure aims to harvest the transformer’s excess thermal energy, combining this energy type with the ‘domestic’ devices that service the building.

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The programme of this particular iteration is a combination of hybrid educational facilities (targeted at hi-electric consuming research operations) on the lower levels, common and service spaces on the middle ones and dwelling spaces on the top levels. The project is composed of stacking four heterotopic slabs, where architecture and electricity fight for their presence on the layout. Inhabitable space is constructed not by following cultural or even pragmatic hierarchical construction methods (from the core structure out to the plaster finishes) but by organising space according to the electric demand of the programmes proposed for each area. The logic instrumentalised to generate space here follows two rules: first, electricity retreats as architecture advances and vice-versa. This means that as spaces are ‘energised’, classical architectural elements will not be present in the layout. These layouts will be streamlined to the conditions of current electric standards, flowing spaces, with devices that ensure the distribution of services throughout. While on the layouts where architecture (read here as privacy elements) become more apparent, electricity is the one to withdraw, ultimately appearing only in the form of a lightbulb in the energy-deprived sanctuary that is the bedroom.

possible sites for intervention

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This heterotopic moment in the grid becomes then a space where the normal relationship with electricity is interrupted; the design intends then to negotiate the dangerous beauty of these infrastructures.

London’d Electric Supply Grid

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an architectural atmosphere grows around it

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SECTION III

POWER & DESIRE

PART I

A PROCESS OF ASSIMILATION

AMBER FASCINATIONS

FIG 35 (previous, opposite) Madame du Barry and two servants demonstrate an experiment on electricity to a lady seated in a chair attended by two men.

Engraving by J,F. Beauvarlet c 1770

To understand the mystical notions attached to electricity, it is interesting to look at publications issued around when its development as a domestic force took place. In the context of the United Kingdom and London in particular, we can observe technical bulletins and publications with an academic orientation. Most interestingly, publications that at the time would be accessible to the general public helps depict the way ‘the history’ of electricity was portrayed. In ‘A History of Electricity’, Benjamin Park stressed that “…the attempt to account for the magnetic attraction as the working of a soul in the stone led to the first attach of human reason upon superstition and the foundation of philosophy”68. Such is the gravity that was embedded in this mineral [ambas or lodestone].

68 Park, The Intellectual Rise in Electricity: A History.

69 Park, 19.

70 Park, 17.

Chance. Therefore, the history of electricity is intrinsically tied to the human contact/use of the amber stone.

Throughout the 19th century is given several classical and immaculate histories… Ambar use is evidenced in the ‘royal’ tombs of Mycenae, Sardinia and ancient territories of Etruria, proving its existence and human use since ‘pre-historic’ times69. It is apparent that amber, in particular, was used as a stone jewel for decoration, which appears named in Greek literature as an “electron”70 as a derivation of ‘elector’ or a miniature version of the sun. It is in this description of ‘daily classical’ life that a story of which was the first encounter between humans and the electric force is described. As amber was used to build spindles, and in the motion of using them, rubbing against their garments would create static, electrifying the amber pieces. When moved around, particularly around pieces of fabric, for instance, these would react to the charge in the metallic objects being driven by an invisible force.

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FIG 36 The Electropathic Guide, a brochure with the ‘latest’ advancements in the practice of electrical medicine.

S.M.Wells Medical Electrician (ME) 1852

71 Park, 503–30.

72 Quote from the chairman of the (B)E.D.A., extracted from minutes of a meeting that took place in 1934. Still, by this point in time, fear of electricity was considered to be an economic danger to be accounted for in the industry. D.A. Wilson, ‘The Economic Development of the Electricity Supply Industry in Great Britain, 1919-1939’ (University of Loughborough, 1976). Chapter 5.

73 Park, The Intellectual Rise in Electricity: A History, 4.

74 Robson, The ‘A B C’ of Domestic Electricity, 15.

Commodity. In the 19th century, although there was an effort by the market’s interested parties to remove the magical and necromancing notions around electricity, this was done to a certain extent. On the one hand, we have mentions of haunting fear experiences to be dealt with (as seen by the industry’s key promoting bodies): “One of the greatest bugbears to be contended with in the development of electricity [is] the haunting spectre of fear”72 “Electricity is not now occult, it is not mystic, it is not magic, its working is no more wonderful than are the rise and fall of the tides.”73

Entertainment. The Leyden jar is a type of capacitor, a device that can store electrical energy. It was developed in the 18th century by a Dutch scientist named Pieter van Musschenbroek, and quickly became a popular demonstration of the power of electricity71. In the 18th century, the Leyden jar was used as a form of entertainment for royalty and the wealthy elite [see FIG 00]. The Leyden jar consists of a glass jar or bottle, coated on both the inside and outside with metal foil, and a metal rod or wire that runs through a stopper at the top of the jar.

To charge the Leyden jar, the metal rod is connected to an electrical source, such as an electrostatic generator or an already charged Leyden jar. The jar becomes charged with electricity, which is stored in the metal foil coating on the inside and outside of the jar. When the jar is discharged, a spark jumps from the metal rod to the metal foil, releasing the stored energy as an electrical discharge. This spark/discharge inevitably looks for the closest neutral body around. Human bodies were ‘put’ in their way, creating bursts between them. Electricity tickles but, at the same time, has the power of lightning to light up fires.

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But on the other, we have documentation that was spread out at the time, which only partially exposes the scientific notions behind this energy. Attributing the simplicity and the lack of technical and precise terms to the education of the general public, which would not be able to deal with, certain notions were kept in the dark, a trade secret, if you will. Keeping the whole picture disassembled allowed the businesses to maintain control of the energy devices’ manufacturing, development, and distribution.

“It is hoped that the perusal o the book, since the scientific principles on which the production and use of electric currents depend is explained, will create a desire in the minds of the readers to know more about the subject and to study it seriously […] [however] the explanations given in this book include as few technical terms as possible….”74

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Finally, Electricity abstracts interactions between users. It becomes the invisible mediator of a powerful economy which links thousands through hundreds of kilometres but prevents their encounter. When describing the role of labour concerning the conceptualisation of commodities, Marx states: “The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange.”75 The same occurs if we invert the equation.

Where private individuals are only identifiable through their consumption of this commodity. Furthermore, the private condition of their consumption is critical to the value definition of the commodity as such as it is to their own definition as individuals.

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75

Marx, Capital, 50.

SECTION III

POWER & DESIRE

PART II

A PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION

PRIVATE ENERGY

FIG 37 (previous page) C. Beecher and H. Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home. New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1869.

“It is the aim of this volume to elevate both the honour and the remuneration of all employments that sustain the many difficult and varied duties of the family state, and thus to render each department of woman’s profession as much desired and respected as are the most honoured professions of men.”76

FIG 38 Plan of main floor for ‘A Cottage in the English or Rural Gothic Style” Design 2, Andrew Jackson Downing, Cottage Residences (New York: wiley and Putnam 1842)

The work by the sisters Catherine Stowe and Harriet Beecher Stowe became a pivotal manifesto for the empowerment of women’s position within the domestic setting77. A work that proposes a house designed as a technologically developed component, but in the same line, presents a way of life to live in such a home, from body exercise and economically correct practices to behavioural guidance and social rules. In ‘The American Woman’s Home’, the authors praise the fireplace and stove as a central tool for the design not only of architecture but of family values, domestic labour, servitude and their functioning within the ‘home’, the optimisation of this device, becomes central to their architectural statement. In their own words, the authors call out how their work can and should be extrapolated into parallel energy sources, should they become available for the owners of the homes78. Energy management, in the form of coal, is pivotal in the discussion their work calls for.

“When the wise woman buildeth her house, the first consideration with be the health of the inmates. The first and most indispensable requisite for health is pure air, both day and night.”79

FIG 39 Plan of main floor for ‘A Simple Suburban Cottage” Design 1. Calvert Vaux Villas and Cottages: A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857)

Morality guides the principles of good and bad space; doctrine ensures the correct approach, and science optimises life towards a better human. They all come together in the form of architecture. The designers take 137

FIG 40 The central core’s functions.

Circulation, storage, ventilation and heating are all inscribed in the same core.

Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869)

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In the way of these improvements, these designs can be seen as the solidifying epitome of the Puritan Christian construction of space. One that, although highly community dependent, employs the family as the ultimate unit of measurement for all socioeconomic activities. And this unit lives and breathes a technological, architectural bubble that keeps away evil nature and inside good one (clean air, some sunlight), which is ultimately organised by a single multi-purpose combusting machine that allows managing, and distribution of energy in the form of heated air, water or food processing.

first floor - sleeping chambers

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over a shroud exercise where a scientific approach is taken towards the design of the house. It begins as an exercise to create a healthy ‘domestic atmosphere’ that would ensure proper ventilation after a growing concern of ill-ventilated spaces due to poor insulation, new materials used for systems such as the Franklin stoves, and rudimentary ventilated chimneys typically used to heat rooms, that lead to carbonic acid poisoning in humans.

foyer living areas cooking area pantry stoves flues bedrooms water storage

The three plans of the house, depicting its energy management devices.

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The central core, is the beggining and end of the design, this device allows, not only for the functioning of the house but also it embodies the architectural functions.

76 Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (Hartford, Conn. : New Brunswick, N.J: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center ; Rutgers University Press, 2002), 18.

77 Gender is housed in this manner.

By simultaneously cementing the position of the female gender within the domestic, into ‘better trained and more optimized’ but nonetheless severely (if not) unpaid servitude for that matter.

78 Beecher and Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 70.

79 Beecher and Beecher Stowe, 43.

80 Kevin Michael Sweeney, Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield: Connecticut, 1639-1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

A brief description of the house: “The rooms of such houses had functions that suited the requirements of the Puritan settlers who resided in them. The “parlour” was always the front room on one side of the entrance; it had the best bed, held the household’s most valuable possessions, and was the room where the head of the household slept, occasionally dined, and met with guests. The front room on the other side of the entrance, the “hall” or the “dwelling room,” was the centre of family life. It was the house’s largest room, the main working and cooking where family meals were eaten. When a kitchen was built into the back of the house, a pantry and an additional bedroom often adjoined it. The upper story was given over to “chambers”, secondary bedrooms whose furnishings were often only beds, or to storage”80 The typical contemporary layouts observed a very different distribution of programme and work. The combusting programmes, the spaces for domestic work, and the spaces dedicated to the woman were relegated to the ‘back’ of the layout. We can safely assume that the 139

predominantly sunny rooms facing south81 would be those destined for the parlour and the social spaces of the dwelling.

The layout proposed by the sisters is transformational concerning gender-specific activities. If the woman was relegated to the ‘combusting’ space, bringing this space/ machine to a central position within the layout gave its users the authority to all the activities happening in the home82. This would become a pioneering exercise of housing gender in plain sight within the domestic83, as the woman’s body is positioned centrally in the house rather than far ‘behind’ it; this body will then control but serve all the programmes surrounding it. Anyone cooking or stoking the stoves and chimney would have visual access to the events occurring in the living quarters and the chambers of the galleries, depending on the floor they are located in. Moreover, the centralisation of all the metabolic activities to a central core gives way to a discussion around optimisation and efficiency, where austerity coming from a sacred notion of Christianity, becomes an important way of approaching house economics and, in turn, defines the condensation of an array of energy-related activities to this central core. However, in this model, the centrality of this core also represents the individuality of the family. All the communal activities previously visible in such communities, such as washing, cooking or storing vegetables, clothes and other provisions, step out of the shared space and into the private domestic, allowed in this case by the efficiency of the central machine.

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The comprehensive technological and socio-economic project that the Beecher sisters put forward then can be envisioned as an effort by the authors to achieve a repetitive model for the unit that is the family.

A unit represented in the individual home, a home that, in the case of the North American context, would be an ‘island’ within prairies of land, where the energy interdependency with others was non-existent and stoked by wood or coal sources84. Moreover, life and architecture alike are constructed around this device, which is the central hearth of the home. Not a hearth in the medieval concept, an open, more or less efficient structure, but a complex device embedded into the house’s structure.

Where efficiency, in this case, is used to, in essence, transform the effectiveness of the female body within the household; another thing is happening a house is built around power distribution. A single chimney means a home.

FIG 41-43 Studies of principles of ventilation dynamics, represented here. Temperature differences in air used in lieu of fresh air ventilation. Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869)

“What, then, is the end designed by the family state which Jesus Christ came into this world to secure?”85 81 We are discussing the northern hemisphere’s context.

82 Or maybe the other way around?

Were ultimately the woman becoming a central object within the home, that could be reached from all corners.

83 An early example of what would be later analysed for example on the work Adolf Loos’ ‘Muller House analysis by Beatriz Colomina on her book “Sexuality and Space” (1992), where the female body becomes the ultimate design technique, as an object of design to be placed in and for which space would be designed specifically.

84 The choosing of one over the other was pre-determined by the presence of an urban condition that could provide for the processing of coal and/ or in its absence by extraction of wood directly from forests.

85 Beecher and Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 19.

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...energy management becomes a central mechanism by which to organize space...

...the core acts as a digestor, a distributor of thermall mass; air an heat are collected and alloted to each room...

...the device, gives ridigidty [literally] to the otherwise loose structure that is the ballon frame system...

REGULATING DESIRED SPACE Interior of 1843. Duke’s Terace, Liverpool, adapted based on drawing by C. G. Powel

86 As discussed on Part I, this ‘Britishness’ is of particular interest in comparison to other cultures of the Western world, mainly because of how the design of this person was exported to the colonies and becomes thereafter a key subject model in the globalized world.

87 John Burnett, A Social History of Housing: 1815 - 1970, Reprint, University Paperbacks 707 (London: Methuen, 1983).

The sight now turns to London to understand a modernisation project from an architectural perspective, namely how architecture and its related regulations were instrumental in constructing a British persona86.

When looking into London’s infinite palimpsest of built examples to analyse for the project, one case sample stood out amongst the rest as a clear type of material that could be scrutinised through time, the management of “housing for the urban working classes”87. The study, therefore, focuses chronologically only on the regulatory evolution of social housing, procuring a rigorous analysis of the transformation the type suffered through time as the state agenda and social or economic needs change. An ‘energy reading’ is produced in parallel, looking into the same layouts from an energy perspective to understand the implications (or not) of introducing one energy technology source over the previous one or the next.

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1843. Duke’s Terace, Liverpool, adapted based on drawing by C. G. Powel

1843 1843

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Little Albert Street, Bristol, UK, based on drawing by C. G. Powel, 1850.

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Ear Annexe is abolished. This design of c. 1892 from Port Sunlight area, has no rear projection instead the cooking, clensing module is

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incorporated. Only the coal storage unit remains on the outside. Adapted based on drawing by C. G. Powel

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Designs for Type B and C houses are illustrated by these plans from Lache in Chester - ref: LRR 27/64 and LRR 27/30

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It is difficult to pinpoint the first comprehensive regulatory dispositive towards living space in London, as many of the vestries of the time would regulate their wall sections through local acts or by-laws, which would establish specific standard criteria to follow by those that dealt with (in this case) construction. All these instruments/acts were regulations that stemmed from health issues, as observed by the ruling classes, or through disasters such as the Great Fire of London of 1666, which subsequently gave way to the regulation of the typical Construction system for party walls throughout the city.

Ironically, the most significant attempts to control the dwelling and the integrity of the built space stem from a direct effort to keep out the same energy that is moderately tried to manage in the interior. As early as the mid-1600s, we can observe that following the Great Gire, King George’s “Act for the further and better regulation of buildings and party walls, and for the more effectually preventing mischiefs by fire, within the cities of London and Westminster”88 could be considered as a milestone in terms of regulations. Moreover, these regulations profoundly impacted the fireproofing standards across the British Empire and Europe.

FIG 44 from University of the West of England, Bristol Therefore, better provision of fireplaces sinks, coppers and iron cooking ranges become recommended or installed (these could usually be combined into a single oven and water heater device)

For further discussion throughout the work, two key aspects are defined in the British context through these initial regulating elements, namely, the street and the technical specification of the construction of walls: Streets are given an institutional persona, as an infrastructural piece of the city, as certain technologies become protected under the judicial system (in this case, we are discussing cobblestones or gutter maintenance hole covers) “Lord Mayor, &c. to declare the Streets and Lanes, marks and Stakes; Removing them; Penalty £10 or Imprisonment.; Poor Offender to be publicly whipped.; Reward to Informer.” 89. Furthermore, brick replaces wood and plaster as main elements in the construction of dwellings. As the Act suggests, “And in regard the building with Bricke is not only more comely and durable but also safer against future perils of Fire 160

88 Rem Koolhaas et al., eds., Elements of Architecture (International Architectural Exhibition, Köln: Taschen, 2018), 134.

89 ‘Charles II, 1666: An Act for Rebuilding the City of London’, accessed 20 January 2023, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/ pp603-612#h3-0021.

fire-place efficiency of the back-to-back tenement

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Be it further enacted by and with the Authority aforesaid That all the outsides of all Buildings in and about the said Citty be henceforth made of Brick or Stone or of Bricke and Stone together except Doore cases and Window Frames.”90 With these parameters in line with the construction of houses and dwellings in general, the ‘back-to-back’ terraced houses presented a lucrative model for real estate entrepreneurs of the day. By being restricted only by the building qualities of the party walls between units and having no regulation in relation to minimum space or circulation standards, the type was commonly utilised to house the poorest91. No biological or programmatic criteria organised space. The only order comes from the position of the fireplace, which indicates that that space is, in fact, an inhabitable space where any activity could take place. These are bedrooms, kitchen, reading room, and bathrooms, all the same, stacked one over the other.

The Public Health Act became the first encompassing strategy in London, which mainly regulates sewers, refuse management, and water sanitation administered in each house. Interestingly, a correlation between the energy source of the time, the chimney, and the space it serves becomes evident. As for sanitary and safety purposes, ventilation norms were established to limit the dimensions of underground rooms if they did not present a chimney flue or ventilation means. Moreover, the standardisation of chimney construction techniques on party walls was improved and regulated, further determining the architectural element within every single dwelling.

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As extensive as these by-laws were, they were limited.

On the one hand, they were permissive and not mandatory92. Therefore, entire councils could opt out of them.

Secondly, As by-laws operate, if there were already specific laws in place, although not up to date or following the latest standards of space and sanitation, they could be considered enough and, therefore, new incoming rules disregarded. And finally, the new regulations only applied to new buildings, leaving the already-built fabric untouched.

FIG 45

gas meter source unknown

FIG 46 penny-in-the-slot “meter” from University of the West of England, Bristol by the late 1890s, individually piped water, gas, and later electricity supplies to working class houses werer common in many towns; and gas for lighting and cooking on the penny-in-the-slot system was making much progress.

90 ‘Charles II, 1666: An Act for Rebuilding the City of London’.

91 Burnett, A Social History of Housing. pp.70-77 92 Burnett, 141–87.

93 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, 2d ed (Oxford [England]: B. Blackwell, 1971). pp. 57-58 94 E. Woodman, Home / Away: Five British Architects Build Housing in Europe: The Development of Housing in Britain 1870 – 2008 (British Council, 2008).

95 Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 161.

These architectural devices become critical signifiers in the work of Engels as he describes the most common issues in the labouring classes housing in 1844, Manchester, ‘the inadequacy of foundations, porous bricks, external brickwork of only 41⁄2in instead of at least 9in, unseasoned timber, floors whether of timber or stone laid directly on the earth, improperly flued chimneys, and sometimes the complete absence of a trapped drainage system93. By the end of the 19th century, the dominant form of housing in the UK became the ‘by law’ terraced house, with 2.5 million built between 1870 and 191094.

Bylaws brought significant improvements to these conditions. “…sounder constructional methods and materials meant better insulation from cold, dam and noise.”95 Higher ceilings and larger window openings also allowed for better ventilation and better lighting but implied colder rooms, specifically bedrooms. Therefore, better provision of fireplaces sinks, coppers and iron cooking ranges become recommended or installed (these could usually be combined into a single oven and water heater device). By the late 1890s, individually piped water, gas, and later electricity supplies to working-class houses were common in many towns; gas for lighting and cooking on the penny-in-the-slot system was making much progress.

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FIG 47 Representation “before and after” of the Jago vs. The Boundary Estate’s urban imaginary sought for.

Cutting from source unknown

The Boundary Estate

96 Burnett, A Social History of Housing. Pp.83-85 97 More so than any if we consider the simultaneous technocratic urban project that was the electrification of the perimetral area of London, which was the Vestry of St Leonards (Shoreditch) and The Jago.

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Philanthropic efforts to house the urban working classes began to function as financial enterprises in London by the mid-1850s, as the foundation by the Rector of Spitalfields of the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwelling of the Industrious Classes started to operate. This mechanism was characterised by its self-limitation to 5% per annum in earning, therefore declaring itself to being “able to provide the labouring man with an increase of the comforts and conveniences of life with full compensation to the capitalist”96. These attempts become the predominant mechanism by which housing for the working class is provided, and further standardisation of space is achieved. From an architectural perspective, this mechanism becomes a pivotal instrument to create a desired population standard in the moral and sanitary correctness that modern society calls for—aesthetics and functionality was provided for and defined by these models.

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The Jago and the 1882 Electric Lighting Act. One of the most exemplary cases of community and urban design attempts of 19th century London could be the case of the Boundary Estate project97. The neighbourhood of the Jago, as called by its locals at the time, was, by the 1880s:

FIG 48 Representation “before and after” of the Jago vs. The Boundary Estate’s urban imaginary sought for.

Cutting from source unknown

“…one of the worst areas in east London, both because of the character of the houses and their occupants. To give some idea of the character of the area, let it first be known that the area formed the nucleus of the ecclesiastical parish of the Holy Trinity. This parish held a total population of about 8,000 persons and was endowed to the extent of £200 a year. No church existed, and services were held in a long room over a stable in Old Nichol Street. The people might fitly have been described as heathens”98.

98 London County Council, ‘Opening Ceremony By His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales of the Boundary Street Area, Bethnal Green’ (P. S. King and Son, 1900), 4, London Metropolitan Archive.

99 Paraphrasing from the first chapter’s description of Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (London: NA, 1896).

166

A two-pronged design exercise begins in the area then. On the one hand, the area falls into the ‘revitalising’ urban plan, which includes the Shoreditch Power station’s provision of electricity to illuminate Shoreditch High Street on the West end of the site. After the newly established 1882 (through 1909) Electric Lighting Act, a structure was provided for councils and individuals.

This operation is crucial, as it betters the ‘inefficiency to properly through the light into the criminally intended of the area’99 and solidifies this axis as a ‘respected’ commercial one in the area.

On the other hand, the morphology of the area is transformed. Under the powers invested by the Housing Act of 1890, the Council of Bethnal Green and Shoreditch stepped in to demolish and erect new and desirable constructions that would be ‘landmarks to observe and learn from’100. On the one hand, an identity wipe-out is done by officially renaming all the streets, neighbourhoods and plazas. As the new plan proposed 167

FIG 49 Existing condition at the Jago / St. Nichols neighbourhood. London County Council, ‘Opening Ceremony

By His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales of the Boundary Street Area, Bethnal Green’.

168

FIG 50 Urban Plan for the Boundary Estate project. London County Council, ‘Opening Ceremony By His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales of the Boundary Street Area, Bethnal Green’.

169

front elevation

ground floor plan

0

1

5m

a distinctive new urban geometry based on a concentric arrangement of housing buildings, opening streets 1.5 times wider than the standard 36 feet time would make sure that a slumming condition would not return, and the authorities could appropriately exercise control over the area.

The Boundary Estate project is an exemplary case of the philanthropic movement agenda. Contrary to the ‘generically produced’ rooms we can observe in the tenement examples, which were oriented for transient individuals and quick returns for their investors, the Boundary Estate presents very defined architectural layouts.

These layouts are outlined mainly by their services, establishing a straightforward way to operate within the space provided. If we pay attention to the positioning of the chimneys and their flutes, we can verify how they structure the space; there is no other way of using this space other than in relation to these devices. Moreover, the project produces layouts that could be assumed as an effort to solidify the family nucleus as the basic social unit of measurement, as the project provides for 15 one-room flats, 500 two-room flats, 400 three-room flats and 100 four-room or more flats.

(previous) Boundary Estate, Laleham Buildings, LCC, based on plans from 1881 Redrawn from original plans, London Metropolitan Archive, H14/12

FIG 51 Typ. construction of a prototype per the Adison Act, 1919.

Source unknown FIG 52 Prototypical kitchen / bathrooms per the Adison Act, 1919 Source unknown

100 London County Council, ‘Opening Ceremony By His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales of the Boundary Street Area, Bethnal Green’.

101 Raymond Unwin FRIBA, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding: How the Garden City Type of Development May Benefit Both Owner and Occupier (London: Forgotten Books, 2018).

172

Raymond Unwin’s 1912 “Nothing to be Gained by Overcrowding”101 deployed urban and economic concepts that will be discussed up to this day. Immediately after this pamphlet, the Local Government Board, following Unwin’s proposal, established the need for new dwellings to separate the energy ‘hubs’ within the household strictly. The bathroom and kitchen shared much of the same infrastructure, and therefore, it was not immediately suggested that they would be separated. However, it was determined that it was a priority to further subdivide these functions by isolating bath functions upstairs. After the First World War, Unwin joined the Committee spearheaded by Walter Tudor Walters, a committee tasked with analysing the current housing for the working class in the United Kingdom to address a deficit estimated at 100.000 houses per year that would be needed in the years following the war.

Conscious of the advancement of domestic electricity, the committee presented, in their analysis, the study of alternative layouts per each power force that was accessible at the time and thought for the near future (i.e. coal, gas, and electricity). It is here where household energy management becomes once again an instrumental social engineering tool. The modern family-based project met the Total Electric one. Following Unwin’s ‘Garden City-like programme distribution, the dwelling was designed around the idea of a four-member family unit, with clear gender separations and hygienic standards in place. It is interesting to note how in Unwin’s 1912 proposal, electricity had not yet been considered central but a possibility that could incur in the future.

Therefore, the separation of wet spaces vs those that could be purely electric such as the kitchen or laundry areas, was not predetermined. However, after the ‘Tudor Walters Report’, as electricity became a real possibility, we can observe how the layouts are designed with this in mind. Wet spaces, deemed dangerous when in contact with high electric currents, will be clearly separated by architectural devices if not by a layout design altogether.

173

Axon - Addison Act Type II House 1919 redrawn from plans directly from the Act.

102 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Even though electricity was not a technology present in the working-class imaginary – as it was too expensive by this time – at the turn of the century, the gross of the layouts was designed assuming it would become standard. Heat sources, such as chimneys, had far lower costs at the time, given their construction in brick and an almost negligible operation. However, these directly impacted the layouts they provided heat for, as their rigidity implied a fixed layout unless heavy construction took place. The fact is suggestive, then, that the household’s economy was not considered an immediate problem from a governmental top-down planning strategy. On the contrary, these new housing standards regulated the working-class family unit. As energy sources such as coal and gas withdraw from the layout, along with them, solid infrastructures such as chimneys, storage rooms, or dedicated flues, disappear too. Therefore, technically speaking, the layout should become unattached to the energetic elements that service them. However, we observe the solidification of space with what now has become an intricate net of cables, plugs and sockets.

In Lewis Mumford’s terms102, the ‘neotechnic’ building is ‘freed’ by wires, and every building is a potential consumer of secondary energy rather than a producer. The building is plugged into the infrastructural grid fed by a distant combustion plant (coal, gas, atomic, etc.) Buildings are deprived of the internal moment of combustion and become outputs, terminals of the system, and charging points.

1m

0

175

Electricity enters the domestic space as a follow-up act of the previous technology, in many cases gas, if not coal, devices throughout the house but specifically over the urban plan. This is evidenced in two planes. On the one hand, we can observe how the layout is almost untouched, unbothered by these new systems that come in place. In itself, the transformation has more to do with the use-diagram of space, now organised by the devices that take over space. There is, however, one clear programmatic division that becomes evident through the regulation’s evolution. Heat spaces begin to be demarcated from what would be called living spaces.

They are materialised and fit for purpose, with unique finishes, and proper precaution takes place regarding all the piping that needs to get to them as seamlessly as possible. In kinetic terms, the kitchen becomes by far the most loaded room, responsible for housing the most demanding types of equipment. The rooms that lost part of their function because of this gained specificity in the devices that now occupy these rooms – a heater is a heater, not a heater/cooker. This definition of space and function, hand in hand with the devices that occupy them, plays very well with Total Electric’s project agenda.103

103 See Section II, Part II ‘Steady and Beautiful’ – where the propagation of specific electric devices is discussed in the context of the spread of electricity as a major domestic energy force.

Coal axon - Addison Act Type II House 1919 redrawn from plans directly from the Act.

1m

0

176

Gas axon - Addison Act Type II House 1919 redrawn from plans directly from the Act.

1m

0

electric axon - Addison Act Type II House, 1919 redrawn from plans directly from the Act.

1m

0

DESIGN III

ENERGY DOES NOT FLOW IN CABLES

PARASITES 182

183

"...the various forces that compose metropolises run rampant, working against each other instead of collaborating, so energy is lost rather than gained."

L. Hilberseimer, Großstadtarchitektur

184

185

104 Oxford Economics, ‘The Economic Contribution of the Real Estate Sector to the UK Economy’, 2018, 11, wet module

wet module extension

food preparation modeule

sleeping areas

living areas

Jesus Green - Typ. Unit

jesus green - typ. unit

Typ. Unit - Space related to initial sources

chimneys defining space

0

0

4m

4m

Typ. Unit - Programme

jesus green - typ. plot volumes

combination of gas and water

Typ. Unit - space wrapped in layers of technical equipment

0

0

The project identifies a commercial synergy, a part of the idiosyncrasy of London, the constant need for transformation of the dwelling fabric. A city which relies upon 1/8 of its Gross Value Added (GVA) to the housing market104, growing or contracting, energy is constantly present in this industry.

4m

0

5m

How can energy be materialised? How can it be spatialised? Is there a benefit to these actions? The design argues that architecture and space should be intrinsically bonded. The techno-architectural efforts to generate, store and distribute electric power in a dwelling should no longer be a secondary task, an afterthought; combining these two elements should come to the front page of the dwelling architectural manual. It is adamant in this position as it envisions this strategy as – in chemical terms – a reagent to address a problem of social individuation and private property, which, in the context of London, claims that it is directly connected to the energy management approaches since the mid-19th century.

4m

As a result of the historical genealogy study of the housing typologies that populate the city, the project proposes a systematic intervention on one of these types, in this case, a Victorian Terraced house in Bethnal Green. The site was part of the Vestry effort to eradicate the existing slum condition present in the area in the 1850s. Regulated through a local by-law system, the previous ad-hoc terrace and back-to-back houses were demolished. The blocks that compose the Jesus Green neighbourhood were established in a homogeneous architectural fashion.

The project sees electricity energy management in the dwelling as an originator of social individuation. As we observed in the previous chapters, a by-product of the terraced house construction’s back-to-back chimney layout tied the notions of private property to those devices and architecture to it. A linear array o parallel lines defines the distinction from one unit to the next.

Lines composed of architectural and energy elements

186

187

a

b

c

d

188

0

50m

0

Jesus Square - Bethanl Green

189

200 m

0

Jesus Square - Bethanl Green

190

191

25 m

are regulated by insurance policies.105 The project then intends to break with this parallel order and perpendicularly perforate these lines. This model, then, becomes a redundant model of repetition. What originally was an ‘efficient’ appreciation of structure and building methods – to stack chimneys back-to-back – as the different energy sources entered the domestic (gas, electric, hydrogen), the repetition of the model became redundant. Entire kitchens, boilers and bathrooms occupy the same footprint on each unit, mirrored inefficiency, ensuring the individual consumption of these devices.

Still, the repetition would be absurd if we were to think about these dwellings as singles but as part of a whole.

105 See the ‘Walls’ booklet, Koolhaas et al., Elements of Architecture.

Therefore, the design will hinge on the current energy crisis consternation to redirect this energy towards its agenda. The preface established before any strategy can be proposed is that under the current linear logic of energy appreciation (i.e., a line of production from a faraway plant to the endpoint of net consumption inside the dwelling), no house can become self-efficient, a dependency on a major network is always proposed by the current logic. Therefore, the intention is to present a system of local interdependency, an inter-structure of energy production, distribution and consumption, and a circular design both in its operation and physical connection.

A series of protocols are proposed. The goal is to provide those who own the units a system by which to unite to create an overarching structure that enables an alternative relationship between humans and energy.

The inter-structure intends to challenge the notion of ‘electric infrastructures’ as state-controlled devices of the city. Through the design, the idea of control to a specific distribution of services, and their degrees of accessibility, is questioned as alternative notions of ownership are imposed on the case study, where energy devices are subjected to a sharing system that will compose an urban block loop. The common financing of this structure makes its ownership a common endeavour as 192

architecture is completely technified architecture is completely technified

0

193

0

1

4m

5m

well. The system belongs to all and none, as it is the energy flow that makes this machine/space functional, and this flow is intrinsically reliant on the interdependency of the machine.

boiler

shower

Energy is embedded in a constant in-flux-loop of creation, storage and execution. Devices are not terminals; they become thresholds in this circularity, where all the energies present in the transformative or combusting action that takes place in them are considered; in this way, where one electric discharge is produced, heat or kinetic energy produced by them stored or distributed to another point on the loop. Devices then become spatial elements, not a single object within. They are broken into ‘pieces’ that will be distributed in space, creating a ‘room of’. The inter-structure then feeds and serves this through a system of transversal piping; either kinetic energy is stored, and heat or cold is distributed throughout.

boiler

shower

The spatialisation of energy is then achieved through this structure, as it becomes a platform, a provided and a user of the energy required by the dwellings. Programmes specific to each case study condition populate the project; kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, server, and storage become programmes that are visualised per their energy relevancy, what can be provided by them, and what is taken from them. Electricity becomes, in this case, one of the energies, a crucial one, but one that acts merely as a translating body, an enabler of cooperation between the users and the architectures they inhabit.

washing machine washing machine

wer drain shower drain

ic mains electric mains

lensingclensing devices

grey water

grey water

sewage

sewage

x z y

y

1m

194

x z

1m

195

ting

architectural devices at the service of re-collecting heat energy otherwise dissipated into the atmosphere

thermal mass efficient systems that allow for interconnection between units, conserving that mass-momentum

re-collection: harvest energy residue from the heat pump exchange

x

x

z

z

y

y

1m

1m

heating heating system - proposed

heating system - existing

196

197

uting

air funnel air funnel

coiling fins coiling fins

industrial fans

collective servers provide computing collective servers power to the block provide computing

industrial fans

power to the block

hi-voltage

hi-voltage distribution line distribution line

hi-voltage distribution line

grey & pressure water distribution grey & pressure water distribution

x z

tri-temperature water distribution tri-temperature water distribution

xz

y

y

z

y

1m

1 1m

computing - current

198

computing - proposed computing computing

199

the interstructure circulated through the heating hevices, extracting surplus energy and distributing it

x z y

x z y

1m

food preparation

kitchen - existing

1m

kitchen - common space proposed

200

food preparation

201

0

Jesus Square - Bethanl Green

202

203

25 m

204

205

FIG 00 1/3 existing energy scheme

206

current condition

phase 1

The existing condition presents an energy management strategy focused on the private unit as the end user of all the energies that occupy this space...

207

FIG 00 1/3 existing energy scheme

current condition

phase 1

...architectural devices respond to this strategy as they focus on the private enclosement of the dwelling....

current condition

architectural devices

208

209

FIG 00 1/3 existing energy scheme

current condition

...the trend that this direction allows/seeks for is that of constant subdivision...

current condition

property A property B

energy scheme

210

211

initial technologies of collection and re-collection begin to populate the structure, and suplements the existing FIG 00 programmes 1/3 initial moments of energy scheme

re-collection device

...initial technologies of collection and re-collection begin to populate the structure, and suplements the existing programmes...

phase 2

energy collection device

energy scheme

212

213

the sha

initial technologies of collection and re-collection begin to populate the structure, and suplements the existing programmes

the shared structure ensures energy communication between the paries

FIG 00 2/3 initial moments: architectural devices

re-collection device

energy collection device

cellular beam system steel structure

....the shared structure ensures energy communication between the parties... phase 2

techincal pre-stressed concrete floor panels

214

215

sp

e-collection begin to ments the existing

the shared structure ensures energy communication between the paries

space remains mainly private, but the inter-structure begins to provide spatial alternatives, as it grows

FIG 00 3/3 initial moments: ownership scheme

re-collection device

energy collection device

cellular beam system steel structure

...space remains mainly private, but thetechincal in- pre-stressed concrete floor panels ter-structure begins to provide spatial alternatives, as it grows...

private common

216

217

focusing which where a

as the loop is established, the totality of the programmes FIG 00 to be commoned can be integrated to the inter-structure, 1/3 energy scheme kitchens, servers, laundry rooms, all migrate to the loop

wind tunnels

radiator roof

server rooms

steel structure

...as the loop is established, the totality of the programmes to be common can be integrated to the inter-structure, kitchens, servers, laundry rooms, all migrate to the loop...

218

phase 3

pre-built panels

219

as the loop is established, the totality of the programmes FIG 00 to be commoned can be integrated to the inter-structure, 2/3 architectural devices kitchens, servers, laundry rooms, all migrate to the loop

radiator roof

focusing mainly on programmes that serve the main one which is dwelling, an array of designs are provided, where a combination of cells can cohexst and serve the loop

wind tunnels wind tunnels perforated panels

server rooms

steel structure

pre-built panels

phase 3

...focusing mainly on programmes that serve the main one which is dwelling, an array of designs are provided, where a combination of cells can cohexst and serve the loop...

220

221

focusing mainly on programmes that serve the main one 00 which is dwelling, an array of designs are provided, FIG 3/3 ownership scheme where a combination of cells can cohexst and serve the loop

he totality of the programmes egrated to the inter-structure, ooms, all migrate to the loop

private property is pushed back to its bare minimums, circulation becomes a terrace buffer space between the and the distribution of use on the inter-structure is allocated by need

wind tunnels wind tunnels perforated panels

steel structure

pre-built panels

....private property is pushed back to its bare minimums, circulation becomes a terrace buffer space between the and the distribution of use on the inter-structure is allocated by need.

private common

222

223

224

225

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

106 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, The Marx Library (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 84.

107 Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality, Historical Materialism Book Series 106 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2016), 66-81.

108 Marx, Grundrisse, 84.

In his 1857 introduction to “Grundrisse”, Karl Marx takes an attempt to define the social individual in the following way “…the human being is in the most literal sense a ‘political animal’, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside of society…is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.”106 There is a contradiction embedded in this statement which is fascinating.

As noted by Jason Read, by Marx’s definition (to which this work very much adheres), the human condition is defined by means of interaction with other individuals. 107 In the current capitalist condition, this interaction exists primarily in a productive state. However, as it has developed since the 18th century, the capitalist system presents a paradoxical moment where “the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as mere means towards his private purposes…”.108 To become productive – to be active in this regard – the individual needs to become part of a social fabric, a collective.

However, it is in its maximum expression of the ‘private individual’ (or through the family unit), with its ‘personal’ desires and routines, that the subject becomes more profitable for the system itself. This paradox is present in the electric network as well.

226

227

The electric network, in its current state, exists as a reductive version of its possibilities as an energy force.

It has been simplified to run its course as an optimised version of the system it responds to. As we observed in Section I, the electric network can’t be considered without taking into consideration the assemblages that compose the network in its entirety.

Moreover, this network is not only composed of humans and machines that come into play but, most importantly, of different energies – electricities in particular – that should/could be considered when broadening the significance of this energy form. Presently, the network is working towards a total abstraction, where there is a single unified understanding of it, a centralised operating system through which it is generated and distributed. As we observed in Section II, this system works towards control and regulation through deficit, a promoter of evermore consumption to ensure financially viable production. The question then is, what happens if consumption begins to spread out – to lower its need and fluctuate during the day, adjusting to and heterogeneous population? What is architecture’s role in all this?

228

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ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

COVERSHEET FOR SUBMISSION 2022-2023 PROGRAMME: Projective Cities, Taught MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design NAME: Kayen Montes SUBMISSION TITLE: TOTAL ELECTRIC COURSE TITLE: Dissertation COURSE TUTOR: Platon Issaias, Hamed Khosravi DECLARATION: “I certify that this piece of work is entirely my/our own and that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of others is duly acknowledged.”

Signature of Student:

Date: 24th April, 2023

I wish to thank my family, friends and mentors for their support. Their counsel and guidance have sustained and inspired me during this process.

Furthermore, I am grateful for the financial assistance from the Architectural Association and for the kindness and warmth of the staff throughout the school. To my professors and constellation of tutors along the way, I am deeply thankful for your dedication to encouraging the lines of thought which ultimately became this research.

To my colleagues, I treasure having met you and the endless conversations and moments we shared; It is through our exchanges that this thesis has come to life.

Finally, to my partner, thank you for your patience and love throughout this programme.

240