The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform

The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform by Janette Kim and Erik Carver was released this fall and is now available for purchase on Amazon.

The book is described as a call to action, urging citizens and designers to questions how political ecology can reshape architectural objects and objectives. It is the first book to map the political implications of energy management in architecture. The Underdome Guide re-envisions collective priorities in the face of climate change, at scales ranging from the microelectronic to macroregional.

Notably, the book explores Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 proposal to encase midtown Manhattan under a two-mile-wide glass hemisphere. NextCity released an essay from the guide, “Territory: Energy and Equity” by Georgeen Theodore, which specifically considers Fuller and Sadao’s dome plan. The essay can be read here.

Below is an excerpt from a recent review by Bill Millard for The Architect’s Newspaper:

“The Underdome Guide presents ideas from the Underdome Sessions, a panel series held in 2010 by the Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship, Columbia’s Urban Landscape Lab, and Studio-X, where participants considered multi-systemic responses to anthropogenic conditions, metaphorized as variations on an implausible scheme.

For example, Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 proposal to encase midtown Manhattan under a two-mile-wide glass hemisphere was “breathtaking in its reductivist ambition to solve many complex problems with a single architectural gesture,” but was a serious enough thought-experiment to become an archetype…”

The book can be purchased on Amazon.com.