Power / Energy: Shaping the American Landscape

Description

Power/Energy: Shaping the American Landscape explores how the development of the national electrical grid configured the American landscape. The patterns of urban and territorial infrastructure are re-considered as metabolic processes in order to develop an alternative to these networks of production, distribution and consumption in relation to the assembly of the city and its corresponding territorial region. The publication responds to the acute obligation to upgrade and expand the electrical power grid system - most of the electric transmission and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life expectancy - to meet the demands of growing urban communities, and simultaneously address global implications of climate change that require a re-thinking of these infrastructures to inherently hold a capacity for adaptation, and concurrently serve as the modulating organizational structure of the urban fabric. Energy as Power, Energy as Ecology, Energy as Ground structure the publication. Each section focused on articulating the relationship between the different positions and definitions of energy, and the implications and potentialities of their territorial and spatial formations. The definition of energy is dominated by a western logic of energy as a resource. This understanding was focused on the primary objective of 'putting energy to effective use' that was then translated into power objectives and governance schemes for putting the planet to work in service of fossil-fuel empires. Subsequently this defined concepts of labour, society, and the environment through power struggles for vast territories of natural resources, land claims, the growth of economies, and development of urbanised areas. The now outmoded and failing US electrical network of energy production, distribution, and consumption have shaped the patterns and territorial infrastructure of our urbanized landscapes. This vast infrastructure network describes a complex, dynamic exchange between human beings and the landscape over an extensive period of time. Emerging from these tensions is a thickened ground of multiple heterogeneous parts and networks intertwined with less tangible metabolic and material processes that describe the 'natures' of the urbanised landscape through its indeterminable characteristics. Energy as Power, Energy as Ecology, Energy as Ground frame the three sections of the publication. These sections capture a a suite of drawings capturing the thickened ground of energy. These drawings are accompanied by series of conservations and essays on the tropic of energy as power, ecology and ground.

Dr. Rosalea Monacella's research and teaching, brings together complex urban issues and advanced digital modelling techniques for the generation of sustainable urban futures. Her design approach is one that simultaneously considers forces from the 'ground-up + top down' through a careful and rigorous exploration of complex economic, ecological, and social systems that shape an ever-changing city. She teaches at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.