ON ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY
Description
Published in AA Files 81, the essay considers how renewable electricity could reshape architecture beyond the addition of technical equipment. It frames the transition through three linked ideas—low-temperature exchange, probabilistic efficiency and seasonal abundance—and argues that the physical character of renewable energy demands new forms, habits and regional design cultures.
AA Files 81 issue ↗︎Read on JSTOR ↗︎
“The intrinsic properties of renewable energy have yet to be translated into new forms and habits. The life they enable is different. And so, the design culture they call for will, inevitably, be different.”
“Set against an architecture of combustion chambers and fume exhausts, a new architecture of heat sinks and exchangers is thus about to emerge.”
“Efficiency in the renewable age is therefore more probabilistic than its linear antecedents and based on the likelihood that renewable energy is used when it is most abundant; when it is both cheapest and cleanest.”
“Buildings cannot be appreciated merely as sites of energy usage, but must also be understood as sites of its collection, exchange and storage.”
- AUTHOR
- Octave Perrault
- IMAGES AND GRAPHS
- Octave Perrault
- PUBLICATION
- AA Files 81, 2025
- PUBLISHER
- AA Publications
- EDITOR
- Maria Shéhérazade Giudici
- DEPUTY EDITOR
- Rory James Sherlock
- GRAPHIC DESIGN
- Andrew Reid
- PROOFREADING
- Charlotte Jones
- Pureprint
- ISSN / ISBN
- 0261 6823 / 978 1 738416066
- CONTENTS
- © Architectural Association and the Authors