Underdome stages debates between contending theories of energy efficiency to assess their design potentials for public life. During their residency, Carver and Kim focused on the initial research phases of the project, interviewing journalists, economists, advocates, ecologists, policy wonks, and engineers to map a spectrum of contrasting strategies for energy efficiency. Beyond the scope of the fellowship term, their work will lead to a series of debates and the publication of a guide to energy efficiency in the fall of 2010. Written for designers, this print and online manual will emulate a voter’s guide by evaluating competing models of efficiency and their implications.

Underdome assembles an expanded range of energy efficiency metrics – watts, profit, votes, ownership, leisure, health, and land use, to name a few – to generate a diverse set of criteria by which critical questions of energy policy might be evaluated. In a climate crisis, ask Carver and Kim, shouldn't every option be on the table? In an emergency, shouldn't we be ready to overhaul laws, economies and the built environment? Underdome speculates on the political ecology of energy in order to rethink familiar networks and spaces of the city.

The project is inspired by two proposals that redesigned relationships between buildings and power: Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 Dome Over Midtown Manhattan and the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Fuller and Sadao envisioned an infrastructure that would abandon existing development patterns for a radically new and efficient shared space, expanding climate control to the scale of the city, and redistributing the costs and benefits of architectural enclosure to a broader population. Today, the ARRA is allocating $20 billion for energy projects nationwide on the premise that collective public spending will lead to new efficiencies.

As New York City faces dramatic shifts in modes of investment and development, the Underdome guide will be a call to action, inviting designers to interpret and expand the reach of energy scenarios by re-imaging the logic of efficiency written into urban life.