Roadmap 2050 / Office of Metropolitan Architecture / Rem Koolhaus
I read a really interesting story in the newspaper recently about the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (created by Rem Koolhaus) which has come up with a re design for the whole infrastructure of Europe, to share renewable energy, in a grid system.
"The proposal's starting point is the fact that renewable energy sources such as wind and sunshine are erratic and unreliable, which means they have to be supported by other forms of power. But they are also available in different quantities in different places – wind is abundant in Britain, sun in Spain – and in different seasons. The big idea is to create a power network across the continent linking all these sources, which could then compensate for each other. If it was windless in Britain but sunny in Spain, power could travel from them to us, and vice versa.
This is a political, as well as a technical proposal. "You can use this project to create integration. It creates a very pragmatic reason to integrate," says De Graaf. It coincides with work the OMA has been doing for several years on the ways that the European Union represents itself, through their design and research subsidiary AMO, which "operates in areas beyond the traditional boundaries of architecture". Koolhaas is a member of the EU's Reflection Group, whose job is to think about what might happen a decade or two hence."
