In a climate crisis, shouldn't every option be on the table? In an emergency, shouldn't we be ready to overhaul laws, economies and the built environment? What kind of city and what kind of public could this create?

Underdome weighs competing models of energy efficiency against one another according to their implications for public life and urban space. The project seeks to focus debate not just on dollars and watts, but on free market politics, models of home ownership, open spaces and ideas of nature. Attending to this political ecology of energy can call into question the familiar networks and spaces of the city, and highlight the need for new thinking in architecture and urban design.

Underdome is an ongoing research initiative. It starts by organizing information, interviews, and interdisciplinary conversations between economists, ecologists, policy wonks, and engineers. To frame the potentials of varying positions on energy efficiency, designers will then be invited to make new proposals for New York City.

This work is inspired by two projects in particular: Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 Dome Over Midtown Manhattan and the 2009 American recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Fuller and Sadao proposed 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. Similarly today, the ARRA is investing $20 billion in energy efficiency nationwide, restructuring familiar boundaries between public and private. As New York City faces dramatic shifts in modes of investment and development, Underdome will work with participants to envision the potential for energy efficiency to inform public life in New York City.