AR October 2022: Energy

In the beginning, there was energy. Everything since then has been an exercise in transforming energy from one state into another – food becomes labour, gas becomes electricity, fossil fuels become architecture. In this month’s keynote essay, Barnabas Calder writes: ‘In the millennia before fossil fuels, the circular economy was the only economically viable way to operate’. Recognising that architecture is formed from the fuel we extract to create and sustain it could be a transformative way of thinking about our built environment. This issue seeks to make visible the often obscured links between buildings and the energy sources they are built from, and around.