BEYOND ENTROPY:

Every year the AA School of Architecture commissions a research cluster on a specific theme proposed by members of the school. This research is entitled “Beyond Entropy, When Energy becomes Form” and it promotes the collaboration of artists, architects and scientists on the making of bespoke installations on a specific type of energy.

The theme of the cluster derives from the urgency with which energy has been raised in the recent years in the political, economical, scientific debates, but not quite in the cultural ones. Indeed, within the architectural debate, energy has often been considered either an exclusively technical issue (to be solved by engineers or by highly specialised technicians) or as something relating to the rethoric of sustainability like “green architecture”, and therefore it was treated from a social, ecological and ultimately technical point of view.

This programme of research offers the architects the opportunity to re-appropriate this theme within the discipline of Architecture and to address the debate on one of the crucial issues of our time toghether with artists, scientists, politicians, philosophers and entrepeneurs. In fact, we aim to consider energy in its wider cultural aspect: rather than focusing on the implications and the consequences of energy in relation to the built environment, the ambition is to consider the very notion of energy, before any conventional form of architectural application.

As Aldo Rossi described at the beginning of “Scientific Autobiography”: Max Planck was thrilled by the fact that work is not dissipated but it remains stored for many years, never diminished, latent, in a block of stone until when, a day, it may happen that this same block falls upon a passer-by and kills him. (…) Indeed, in every artist or scientist, the principle of continuation of energy is interlinked with the research of happiness and of death. Even in Architecture this research is related to the Material and to Energy, without this observation it is not possible to understand any construction neither from the static point of view nor from the formal point of view”

RESEARCH CLUSTER DIRECTOR:

Stefano Rabolli Pansera After graduating with Honours from the AA in 2005, he worked for two years for Herzog & de Meuron where he was involved in projects in Italy, the US and Spain. He is currently teaching at the AA. He has lectured at Naples and Cambridge Universities, and has been visiting professor at Cagliari. He has taught in AA visiting schools in Berlin, Seoul and Barcelona. He is founder of Rabolli Pansera Ltd.