Form Versus Flow

“What if architects dealt primarily not with form but with flow—material flow, energy flow, human flow?” asked Joseph Grima, of the architecture studio Space Caviar, in the first session of Confronting Carbon Form, a five part series organized by the architecture journal Log and hosted by Stanley Cho, Elisa Iturbe, and Alican Taylan. It builds on an issue of Log guest edited by Iturbe in 2019, “Overcoming Carbon Form”, that effectively attempted to move the discussion around climate change away from sustainability (a word she avoids, because it would suggest we want to sustain the status quo) and into form. But form, too, has its own baggage.

“Should we shift the focus from form to flow, as Space Caviar suggests?” later asked Michael Cohen, of citygroup. Iturbe protested. Grima doubled down. After the Second World War, he explained, “Architecture became relegated to the production of form.” Today, Grima went on, the profession mainly concerns itself with “the decoration of trophy buildings.”

In her presentation, Sofia Pia Belenky, a partner of Grima‘s at Space Caviar, showed how flow plays out in their current project, “Non-Extractive Architecture,” at their year-long installation at the Palazzo Zattere: The installation keeps installing itself throughout the year. As more research is done, a software widget (the Exhibition Format Editor) allows the researchers to plug in photos and churn out wall-sized displays. Those walls, in turn, become the pages of their next book.

The final presenter, Professor Cara Daggett of Virginia Tech, coiner of the term “petro-masculinity,” and author of the book The Birth of Energy, gave a smashingly good presentation on, well, energy. The painter William Turner was involved. The three myths of energy:

Myth #1: It is timeless—NOPE! It was born out of nineteenth-century thermodynamics.

Myth #2: Energy is universal—NOPE! We learned about energy so we could optimize fossil fuel burning steam engines.

Myth #3: Physics knows what energy is—NOPE! Energy is not a thing, it is a set of equations, and theoretical physicians sometimes fudge or ignore it (or to quote Nobel Laureate Percy Bridgman, energy is “a mysterious epistemology, not a hard fact.”).

What does all of this have to do with architecture, or form for that matter? Daggett could not quite say—her preferred target are engineers: “Energy, work, and freedom are bound together, and ratified by modern engineering.” Buy the book. I definitely just did.

The second presenter, Andreas Malm, came by way of a choppy pre-recorded interview, but probably posed the question closest to the heart of the series. After arguing that fossil fuel extraction is bound up with the rise of capital, he asked: “What do we do with this enormous energy infrastructure that has to be dismantled?”