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Trienal de 
In partnership with VI PER Gallery in Prague, the Triennale is commissioning a double-exhibition, open simultaneously in both cities, that explores how energy moves, transforms, and dissipates – both within bodies and throughout the material world.
In the prevailing economic system, making architecture still means relying on the extraction of the maximum amount of materials, value and energy, often going beyond the limits of what the planet or the body can replenish. The different stages in the design and construction of a building reveal a continuous cycle of effort and over-extraction in the architectural production chain, from raw materials to labour.
Energy is an essential part of this inquiry: the term embodied energy corresponds to a tallying up of all the energy consumed during a building or one of its component’s life cycle, from raw material extraction to disposal, and is often used as one of the ways to assess a building’s environmental impact. Revealed in this calculation is an understanding that the movement, transformation, and dissipation of energy sustain the production of architecture. Energy is the animating and underlying factor from the extraction of raw material all the way to the extraction of value, namely surplus value, through the mobilization of work at the building site, as well as in the architecture office.
The exhibition explores the tight relationship between energy, work, and value in the production of architecture and the built environment. When energy is disclosed as the material ballast for value, the maximization of value expresses the maximization of energy consumption. Architecture production happens at the edge of overexertion, sometimes fully engaging with it, and thus Taking More than What’s There to Give.
This panorama showcases research from around the planet involving relations between the consumption of energy, in all its forms, and the maximization of value. This spans the mine, where architecture both depends on and supports raw material and energy extraction; the factory, where environmental impacts and dangerous work conditions go hand-in-hand; the infrastructural space, where all the energy flows are spatialized in the form of workers and materials; the building site, the crux of architecture production and principal site for surplus value extraction; the office, where the financialization of space directly impacts how architects work; and the inhabited building, where all of these conditions come together and the building is then consumed.
Works by Fellows of the LINA European Architecture Platform are divided between Prague and Lisbon, where the exhibition happens simultaneously, tackling inhabited architecture as a consumer of energy; speculative cartographies of territorial dynamics of exhaustion in Europe; and networks of solidarity between workers in the building industry to tackle the climate crisis. Completing the exhibition, the video piece The Void of its Other explores the financial and political pressures and incentives that shape contemporary housing production in Rotterdam.
Taking More than What’s There to Give is a deeply collective and pluriversal contribution towards a future for architecture that doesn’t involve the overexertion of our planet and its inhabitants.
With works by: Alfonse Chiu & Emma Kaufmann LaDuc, Alina Paias & Benjamin Schoonenberg, Liisa Ryynänen, and Netherlands Angry Architects!
Economies of Architecture showcases research by: Angela Gigliotti (Research Fellow Roma, Istituto Svizzero), Belgian Architects United, Evelina Gambino (Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography and College Lecturer, University of Cambridge) & Jess Gough, Jean Souviron (Early-Career Fellow, Collegium Helveticum), Laura Pappalardo (PhD Candidate, University of São Paulo), Lesia Topolnyk, Liam Ross (Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture), Paulien Bremmer, Serah Calitz (PhD Researcher, TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment), and Sergio Kopinski Ekerman (Associate Professor, Faculty of Architecture at the Federal University of Bahia).
16:00 – Welcome Cocktail
16:30 – Guided Tour
With curator Alina Paias and participants: Netherlands Angry Architects, Alfonse Chiu, Emma Kaufmann LaDuc, and Liisa Ryynänen
17:30 – Presentation by Professor Liam Ross, University of Edinburgh
Economies of Fire: Our built environment is shaped by fire in multiple ways. Combustion fuels most of the processes necessary to construct and maintain buildings. Architecture is also shaped by a third form of combustion: accidental fires that occasionally destroy buildings and the investments made in them.
18:30 – Presentation by Researcher Adam Przywara, University of Freiburg
Building from Rubble in the Aftermath of War: Repair, adaptive reuse, material repurposing, and mechanized recycling were essential strategies for rebuilding European cities in the wake of World War II. By relating historical case studies to contemporary examples of circular reconstruction strategies in Ukraine, this presentation aims to foster a critical perspective on energy and resource conservation in architectural production.
10:30—16:30 – Giving More Than What’s There to Take
Reading Exhaustion in the Planetary Mine is a one-day workshop by Alfonse Chiu, from Yale School of Architecture, and Emma Kaufmann LaDuc, form ETH Zurich, that invites participants to develop critical strategies and tactical actions to address the challenges of exhaustion in spatial and social practices.
Drawing on the conceptual expansion of the “planetary mine” – proposed by political geographer Martín Arboleda, building on the work of Mazen Labban – as a useful tool for thinking about how the infrastructural expansion of capital on a planetary scale has created new interconnected geographies in which commodities and labor are extracted and depleted.
Open to the public and free of charge, the workshop requires prior registration via a digital form. Up to eight participants will be selected to join the session. The workshop includes research presentations by the organizers, Alfonse and Emma, as well as writing and drawing exercises. The results will be compiled and published in a digital edition.