Erik Carver and Janette Kim's Underdome asks how architecture can work with energy policy to reshape public life, ideas of ownership, and collective urban space. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 vision for a giant dome over midtown Manhattan proposed an infrastructure that would abandon existing development patterns for a radically new and efficient shared space. By expanding climate control to the scale of the city, the dome redistributed the costs and benefits of architectural enclosure to a broader population. Today, the Obama administration’s plan to invest $20 billion in energy efficiency nationwide also rewrites familiar boundaries between public and private. As New York City faces dramatic shifts in modes of investment and development, Underdome sets the stage for designs and debates over the potentials of federal energy investment. Where should the money go? How can energy investment shape new publics? What kind of architecture can participate in such change? Kim and Carver look beyond the literal enclosure of Fuller and Sadao’s Dome to the accounting and production of networks of energy exchange they see as critical for architecture to engage a political ecology.

During their Van Alen Institute fellowship residency, Kim and Carver will organize a public forum or ‘stage match’ involving players from the fields of economics, ecology, policy, art, and critical theory. Players will be asked to offer competing scenarios of energy efficiency in New York City responding to data sets provided by Kim and Carver for multiple scales radiating out from 42nd Street and 5th Avenue (the original location of the Dome Over Manhattan). Through public debate, Kim and Carver aim to explore the implications of these scenarios not merely for bottom-line energy savings, but for equitable access to the city. Kim and Carver will work with participants to develop and exhibit at Van Alen Institute a series of design schemes in the spirit of Fuller’s project, to envision the potential for the Recovery Act to inform public life in New York City.