Unseen Energy

During my time at UNS Futures, the speculative design unit of UN Studio in Amsterdam, a side project with a colleague sparked an unexpected curiosity about energy consumption. Each day, walking past a massive architectural model of the Wassel Tower in our workshop, we began wondering about its true energy footprint. While we weren't involved in the tower project itself, that model became the catalyst for an interesting exploration.

Out of pure curiosity, we tracked everything we could think of - from the energy consumed in material transportation and studio lighting to daily commutes and manufacturing processes. We even considered the embodied carbon in the raw materials. What did we find? The energy required to produce this single marketing model could power our entire building for a month. While not a rigorously scientific study, this informal investigation planted a seed of curiosity about hidden energy costs in our creative processes.

Years later, that same curiosity now led me to discover ITP's Energy course. As we start this class, I'm drawn to two critical questions:

1. AI Infrastructure & Hidden Energy Costs How do the invisible energy costs of AI infrastructure parallel what I discovered in architecture? Like that architectural model, LLMs have significant hidden energy implications - from training and deployment to ongoing inference. Understanding these parallels could help us better architect sustainable AI systems.

2. Solar Energy & System Analysis Given my experience in systematic energy analysis, I'm particularly interested in exploring how distributed solar solutions could be optimized through rigorous system-level thinking. The course's partnership with Voltaic and access to the Navy Yard installation space provides an opportunity to apply this analytical approach to real-world solar implementations.

Looking ahead to the Energy and AI research presentations, I hope to connect these threads. This course offers me a unique opportunity to develop critical frameworks for understanding and producing work that is critical of energy consumption and use in the world.

My goal is to build upon that initial spark of curiosity from my architecture days, but now with a more structured and technical approach to understanding energy systems, particularly at the intersection of solar power and computational infrastructure.

References

1. Claude by Anthropic

2. Olafur Eliasson - The Weather Project