Oil and post-oil

With its current exhibition, “Energy. Oil and post-oil architecture and grids”, MAXXI takes another step forward in facing the most pressing issues of our times. And it does so in a most daring way — not through the mere documentation of existing projects but rather through commissioned research. "Energy" lies at the heart of a program that will range from a previous exhibit, "Recycle. Strategies for Architecture, City and Planet", to another one regarding the subject of community. The exhibition’s three sections, Stories, Frames and Visions, examine the past, the present and a possible future for the relationship between energy and landscape.
  In the Stories section, projects and built works  — gas stations, highway service stations, motels and towns like Metanopoli — by Ridolfi, Dardi, Gellner and Nervi narrate the fruitful collaboration between architects and the energy industry during the Italian post-war boom of the automobile, highways and speed. The show’s true conceptual and temporal roots can be found in this richly documented section, placed at the end of the exhibition.

Aside from the somewhat weak middle section devoted to a photographic analysis of today’s places of energy production, distribution and use, going back to the future and the show’s beginning, the curator looks to the possible by inviting architects to think about new forms of mobility and the distribution of its fuel. As the entry text states, "seven architects … design service stations for the coming decades."

But if it is clear that the service station of the future will primarily and fundamentally be a space of production, what emerges from the exhibit is the difficulty that architects have in really delving into the specific needs of new energy forms. For example, Sou Fujimoto’s well/forest is very poetic, but it is hard to understand whether and how it will work from an energy standpoint. Equally powerful in architectural terms is the gridded superstructure for highway service areas by IAN+. But again, it is not clear how and why the production of hydrogen from algae can really benefit, or at least gain effective hospitality, from the specificity of this solution.

The relationship between form and energy is more convincing in Noero Architects’ industrial micro-infrastructure. Starting from the realities of a small fishing village, the architects invent a device that can be located in between houses and in public space to help sustain new local economies.

MODUS Architects offers a simple but powerful proposal: 6,650 kilometres of Italian highway are doubled through the creation of a continuous and modulated raised ribbon containing 160 million square meters of solar park that can produce and distribute energy. If oil was once quantified in terms of volume, solar energy now requires surface area. This proposal could have been bolder, however, by giving substance to this area, thus truly combining form and technology.

In conclusion, the inevitable question for those who think about architecture and new forms of energy is this: why invite architects to reflect upon possible post-oil scenarios by asking them to design a service station, something so clearly linked to a type of energy use that is in decline? Why not gear their thinking towards the real issue of the transition from oil to renewables: how will places of production change when they are no longer centralized but widespread and distributed throughout our regions? Isn’t this perhaps the crux of the matter regarding our built landscape, transforming it from a place of consumption to a place of production?

Despite the far-sighted choice of subject matter, the impression is that the curators are the first to find it difficult to break free from the impact of a modernity whose glories and logic architects are generally reluctant to abandon. Marialuisa Palumbo

Through 29 September 2013
Energy. Oil and post-oil architecture and networks
MAXXI Architettura
Stories curated by Margherita Guccione and Esmeralda Valente
Frames curated by Francesca Fabiani
Visions curated by Pippo Ciorra
Via Guido Reni, 4, Rome