Architecture as Catalyst: MAXIMUM POWER DESIGN

This Catalyst studio proposes an architectural agenda for energy.

Such an agenda is distinguished from the engineering agenda for energy that dominates architecture today. Of the many architectural and ecological shortcomings of this borrowed agenda is the thermodynamically impossible notion of energy efficiency. Energy cannot be made more or less efficient. Energy is always transferred at 100% efficiency. The reductionist and mechanistic preoccupation of energy efficiency, optimization, minimization and neutrality in architecture today thus engenders inaccurate ideas, misguided means, and perplexing products that neither serves architecture nor ecology well. If fact, these concepts run counter to the behavior of energy systems and thus occlude great ecological and architectural potential.

In contrast to this errant paradigm, architecture needs a far more exacting and ambitious agenda for energy today. It needs an agenda for energy that is at once thermodynamically accurate and ecologically exuberant. Importantly, it must achieve those ends with means that amplify the purposes and potential of architecture itself. Thus this Catalyst studio tables theories, techniques, and technologies of an architectural agenda for energy: maximum power design.