Power, in legal terms, refers to the capacity, faculty or authority to act, exercised for personal or collective ends; more generally, the term is used to indicate the real or presumed capacity to influence the behaviour of human groups. In physics, power is the amount of energy transferred or converted per unit time. Both these shades of meaning are contained in the exhibition Power, open at the CIVA Museum of Architecture in Brussels until February 25, 2024. The show challenges us to think about how infrastructure relates to life across political institutions, citizen participation, geopolitics, climate justice, architecture, landscape design, and engineering. From a microscopic to a planetary scale, the exhibition brings together small experiments and analyses of larger systems, utopian visions and practical perspectives, local actions and global geopolitics.

We took a tour of the exhibition with Silvia Franceschini, co-curator of the project and contemporary curator of the museum. She first tells us about the museum's general approach and the aim of the exhibition, “Our exhibitions usually combine historical and archival investigations with newly produced contributions. With Power we try to investigate—without pointing to one-size-fits-all solutions—a complex and global issue. We want to hook these questions to a precise context, which is the city of Brussels, which is also the core of the European Union, as the location of some of its main institutions, such as the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament.”

The opening section presents research by Dennis Pohl, whose publication Building Carbon Europe (to be published by Sternberg Press in 2024) reveals how architecture has also played a role in determining our present-day dependence on coal, steel, and nuclear energy. Since the 1950s, architects have proposed territorial, regional, and urban development plans that served the European political project. They collaborated with the European Coal and Steel Community to render the steel building industry as efficient as the car industry; and incorporated ideas of infinite nuclear energy, as promoted by the European Atomic Energy Community, into their designs.

A large archive section focuses on the construction of the Atomium, one of the modern symbols of Brussels, and the important 1958 Universal Exhibition, the first of the post-war period. “Expo 58 in Brussels marked the initial optimism of the nuclear era: in its centre energy-related pavilions such as the Congolese Pavilion on Uranium and an unrealised nuclear power plant on the grounds of the fair. Long before the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima gave birth to a dark aesthetic of catastrophe, the atom was embedded in an optimistic aesthetic program, spearheaded by Claude Parent in his designs for the French nuclear program in their reaction to the oil crisis in the early 1970s,” the Italian curator explains.

Alongside the first section connected to the past, we uncover an installation that subsequently puts emphasis on the present and the future: the work of the research centre The New Open, from the Dutch TU Delft University. “With the researchers from The New Open, we wanted to completely rethink the way the exhibition is heated. They prototyped an infrared heating system—with devices supplied by the Italian company Star Progetti— that is designed to switch on only when visitors pass by. In addition, the intensity of the heating can be adjusted according to the energy resources available in Belgium. The installation monitors the amount of energy on offer in the country at any given time and adapts accordingly. The problem of energy consumption in cultural institutions is widespread and has a major impact on our work. With this investigation, we wanted to rethink the architecture of the museum and its performance, but also to question our standards of comfort. Unfortunately, for bureaucratic reasons, the prototyped heating system cannot replace the current one, and the design of The New Open remains in the exhibition as a showcase only,” says Franceschini.

Also on view are the works of photographer Armin Linke, whose images have for years presented a commentary on large infrastructures and on the various manifestations of globalisation, climate change and the 'behind the scenes' of technological systems. “We commissioned Linke to take a new series of photos to tell the story of European summits concerning energy. To do this, we had to do a lot of contact and relationship work with the various institutional offices. Linke depicted the moments when decisions are made, the agencies that regulate energy flows on a continental level and their control rooms," she adds.

From the visionary film The Great Endeavour by Liam Young (also present at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale), to Buckminster Fuller's maps rethinking global energy networks, from the bottom-up initiatives of the City Mine(d) collective to the projects of BC Architects, which reimagine architecture from a circular perspective: the Power exhibition offers a very broad cultural panorama. Power, by virtue, is an ubiquitous eventuality, impacting people dissimilarly. Hyper-technological projects by archistars will not suffice in apptly addressing the issue, but courageous and generous political decisions will be consequential in this epoch-making debate. While the exhibition helps us comprehend the complexity of the issue, it also offers stimuli for individual action (which, of course, is not enough on its own).

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)