What is Energy and How We Might Think About it?

by Sanford Kwinter, Kiel Moe

Energy and design are currently imprisoned within a narrow framework of commonplaces, moral mediocrity, and outright error. Yet the platitudes that ensue from it continue to claim the attention of both the discipline and the fields of urbanism and design.


The book’s hope is to foster a new ethos in design methods and new directions for practice that address the actual capacities and behaviors of the world we live in. Through a variety of short texts on subjects from the history of the sciences and philosophies of energy, as well as an array of examples of current work and historical phenomena, this book positions energy not as an ameliorating appendage but as a central instigator of radical, di cult and sometimes deliriously inventive new modes of practice and thought for current and future generations of students.

With contributions Michelle Addington, Pierre Belanger, Luis Bettencourt, Manuel De Landa, Nicholas De Monchaux, John May, Olafur Eliasson, Mark Waisiuta, Iñaki Ábalos, Sanford Kwinter and Kiel Moe.

192 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2023

About the author

Sanford Kwinter is a Canadian-born, New York–based writer and architectural theorist, and a co-founder of Zone Books publishers. Kwinter currently serves as Professor of Theory and Criticism at the Pratt Institute. He formerly served as an associate professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and has also taught at [link=Massachusetts Institute of Technology], Columbia University and Cornell University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Having received a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University, Kwinter lectured at Harvard University, the University of Applied Arts Vienna ( Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien), the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Over the past twenty years, his publications have pioneered new ideas in art, architecture, science and the humanities. He has written widely on philosophical issues related to design, architecture, and urbanism, and was involved in the series of conferences and publications convened by ANY magazine between 1991 and 2000.