The City as Energy Landscape

This seminar promotes the notion of “energy landscape” as a conceptual framework to challenge our current understanding of energy as a cheap and abundant source for architecture. While in the last few decades the discipline of architecture was mainly concerned with the self-sufficiency of individual buildings, the seminar emphasizes the need for a new urban scale for saving energy, integrating technological systems and natural processes. Such a view relies on the idea of the productive urban environment, in which the built fabric, topography, soil, bodies of water, as well as the urban climate serve as potential energy resources. The seminar highlights concepts and methods for designing the energy landscapes of the future, taking (amongst others) the greater region of Geneva in Switzerland as a case study.