Architects tackling the unseen will shape the future of their profession.

EOS
Advancements in bioengineering will mean increased human sensory perception, as well as a greater ability to perceive the material energies of these spaces.Courtesy Sean Lally

“The world is keeping its eye on the unimportant visible one percent of historical transformation while missing the significance of the 99 percent of overall, unseen changes,” Buckminster Fuller warned in the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, suggesting that such ignorance might one day cause man to annihilate himself. Even though he didn’t mention it by name, modern architecture was clearly one of his targets: “Forms no longer can ‘follow functions’ because the significant functions are invisible,” he wrote.

Today, Fuller would be gratified to see a new generation of architects embracing our crises of energy, climate, and ecology as catalysts for new creative directions.

“It’s difficult to get architects and the general public excited about the importance of energy, other than it being an ethical and moral dilemma,” says the architect Sean Lally of the Chicago-based studio Weathers. Proposing walls of air, columns of heat, and cones of light, Lally argues that energy has a shape and, therefore, “an aesthetic, an organizational potential.” It follows that, one day, we will be able to design with energy....Continue Reading

> via Metropolismag