Custodians of the Solar Landscape.
Research Area
A full system sustainability revolution is upon us, bringing with it “… the most profound disruption of the energy sector in over a century … anenergy revolution that brings about an era of superabundant clean energy unlike anything we’ve seen before.” (Yu, Whittell, Jackson, Dorr & Donti, 2022) The economic competitiveness of solar, wind and batteries will be overwhelming, resulting in an abundance of renewable energy. However, when something new comes along it can be utterly disruptive to what came before. Thus, the focus on a just transition is paramount to avoid leaving people and communities behind, an ethically designed transition that brings people along with it. The energy transition can be seen as an opportunity to address societal issues of inequality, ensuring the poorest in society are not hurt by the transition but aided by it. The support of the masses is required to move forward with this transformation which can be achieved through a clear, ethical and transparent form of engagement and communication.
Framing: The Politics and Ethics of Solar.
Whilst not intended, early drawings and images composed to translate the design project into a research area encompass eidetic methods and its agency as a tool of communication. Framing: The Politics and Ethics of Solar stemmed from questions posed in a critical review of the design project - through the process of layering section, montage and text the drawing aided the establishment of the research area as the communication of the energy transition.
Research Idea
Climate change is a collective problem and cooperative solutions to the energy transition are being implemented in communities throughout Ireland - collective in their clear vision of what the future should hold, bound together by values as opposed to geography, investing in their own physical landscape and built environment generating the returns and change they want to see.
If Mulranny is to achieve an equal, ethical and collective transition there needs to be a clear communication of what the transition is, what it requires, where it is going, what its implications will be and how a co-operative system can achieve this. Architecture can be used to “… solve problems beyond those relevant to architects themselves…” (Cesal, E. 2010) with “…the use of a certain architectural representation as a communication means, that could be attractive and well understood by the community, can encourage public engagement, discussion and generation of ideas, by this ensuring their collaboration during the planning and design process, as active participants and well-informed citizens.” ( Jakupi, Jashari-Kajtazi, 2018). Design and leadership are essentially the same activity. (Cesal, E. 2010)
The Transition So Far
The Transition So Far is an interpretive drawing of an interview by the SEAI 180º podcast with Carol Loftus, Mulranny SEC. The drawing aims to communicate to how Mulranny established itself as a SEC whilst giving a visual presence to what the community has achieved so far in its energy transition - employing similar techniques by collating a series of line drawings as an alternative to photo-montage.
The Co-Operative
The Co-Operative is intended as a participative drawing – one that can be drawn upon with community members when conversing about the solar farm, omitting the need to go through numerous drawings and presentations to communicate it whilst allowing the conversation to be concise and informative. Elements of the previously mentioned drawings are utilised as “layers” to aid the communication of the design with the addition of primary architectural representation such as Plan, Section and Axonometric.
Direction & Method
Many challenges were encountered due to the nature of community based research and the pre-selected methodology, research idea and research outputs had to react and evolve with the challenges and limitations they were confronted with. From the outset, this research settled on participating with the community and as an architect, communicating what you observe from the community through interview, architectural representation and exhibition. These methods established at the beginning of the research had to react to the difficulty in organising interviews with community members – without the interview as a base layer to the drawings, there was no content to work with and no interpretations to evolve into exhibition drawings. As the research progressed and encountered these predicted challenges, it became apparent that the research was focusing primarily on communicating solely to the community rather than acknowledging that Architects were inevitably going to be a part of this audience and process - resulting in drawings overly dictated by text and diagram, not elucidating to the episodic, visual effect of this proposed infrastructure on the ground. Thus, in reaction to this, the research evolved into giving the Solar Farm a visual presence within the community in pursuance of initiating conversation and enthusiasm amongst the people of Mulranny alongside developing a methodology for architects to utilise when engaging and participating with communities on such projects
Initial Research Direction & Method
Firstly, a method of drawing or imaging needed to be resolved, one that communicates to both architects and community whilst still allowing room for speculation. The resultant method evolved into Eidetic Montage.
As part of this process, it became apparent that organising community engagement and participation through workshops and/or exhibition was beyond the scope of the time of the project. Establishing a more elective model of participation could overcome these challenges, evolving a method of designing and assembling participation.
Reflecting upon the design project from semester 2, it became evident that this in itself is a method - one of Construction and design. The process of visualising this design project established a method of drawing and illustration, attempting to address both the community. and architectural audience. The concluding drawing within this process, Custodians of the solar landscape, aims to communicate and visualise an elective model of constructional logic for the future custodians of this landscape. This illustrates how this research process came full circle, centred around the people who will ultimately be responsible for this solar infrastructure on this existing agricultural landscape.
Research Direction and Method by the conclusion of research.
The Role of the Architect.
The role of the architect in community engagement processes is situational and place-based – dependant on the motivations and aspirations of the community involved. In Mulranny, it has been identified with community members that a visualisation of the solar farm is vital in communicating and promoting the future possibility of a community energy co-operative Solar Farm within its evolving landscape. The content produced as part of this research in conjunction with community members is primarily image based, resulting from the methods of interview, drawing and eidetic imagery. It could be argued that one does not necessarily need to come from an architectural education and/or profession to attain this level of communication and community engagement. However, if one did not take the initiative to design and speculate the energy co-operative, the number of solar panels required, the structure of the solar panels, the battery capacity required, the sheltering of those batteries, what land to use and what land to leave for biodiversity, how farming practices can evolve with the solar system, how farmers can be a part of this energy landscape and how the community will utilise it; then there would be no “content” to communicate.
In her PhD research, Melanie Dodd stipulates the various roles and personas of the Architect; The Local can understand and behave as designers from the point of view of the user, The double agent understands and utilizes the powers of agency as an architectural design tool, the educator recognises what design could be and why it matters to society, the artist provokes, operating materially and spatially to present the ordinary and extraordinary and the policy maker is ambitious for bigger ideas but acts within the concrete reality of the everyday. (Dodd, M. 2011) Thus, there are a multitude of roles that the Architect encompasses and within the diversity of these roles the architect composes themselves as a Collaborative Enabler – a person that makes something possible…who works together with others for a special purpose. (Cambridge Dictionary)
This position had been established throughout the research process, illustrated in the Research direction and method by the conclusion of research.