Architectural Studies Professor David Salomon publishes article in the on-line journal Platform

By David Salomon, October 2, 2023

Essay "Caring for Heat: Re-presenting Geothermal Energy at the Eden Project" looks at the new geothermal facility at the popular eco-tourist site.

David Salomon, Coordinator of the Architectural Studies program in the Department of Art, Art History and Architecture had his essay, "Caring for Heat: Re-presenting Geothermal Energy at the Eden," published in the on-line journal Platform. The essay asks:  

Why, two decades after opening, did the Eden Project in Cornwall, England - a self-described “living theatre of plants and people”-  introduce a geothermal heat facility on its grounds? More curiously, why did it not integrate, spatially and aesthetically, the Eden Geothermal facility with its gardens and greenhouses just a kilometer away? By not doing so it lost the opportunity to reveal the site’s, and the culture’s, fraught relationship with the latent energy that lies beneath the Earth’s surface.

This article continues professor Salomon's interest in the aesthetics of infrastructure, and the relationship between architecture, ecology, and landscape.  These themes were previously addressed in the exhibition Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural, that was on display in the Handwerker Gallery in 2019, and in the book of the same name. 

Alexander von Humboldt, Diagram of a Cross-Section of the Earth's Crust, 1841. From Heinrich Berghaus, Physikalischer Atlas (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1852). The preeminent scientist of the 19th century, von Humboldt created or commissioned a series of large cross section drawings that emphasized the relationship between geological and biological developments, illustrating his understanding of the Earth as a singular, interdependent system.

Alexander von Humboldt, Diagram of a Cross-Section of the Earth's Crust, 1841. From Heinrich Berghaus, Physikalischer Atlas (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1852).

The preeminent scientist of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt created or commissioned a series of large cross section drawings that emphasized the relationship between geological and biological developments, illustrating his understanding of the Earth as a singular, interdependent system.