“Beyond Entropy: when Energy becomes Form” promotes the collaboration of artists, architects and scientists on the making of bespoke installations on specific types of energy: Electric Energy, Mechanical Energy, Potential Energy, Sound and Mass. The exhibited works are the results of a process that started in CERN, in Geneva, in February 2010 and culminated with the exhibition of the prototypes in Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice during the Architecture Biennale in August 2010.

The theme of the exhibition derives from the urgency with which energy has been raised in the recent years in the political, economical, scientific debates, but not quite in the cultural ones. Indeed, within the architectural debate, energy has often been considered either an exclusively technical issue (to be solved by specialised technicians) or as something relating to the rhetoric of sustainability like “green architecture”, and therefore it was treated from a social, ecological and ultimately technical point of view.

“Beyond entropy” offers the architects the opportunity to re-appropriate this theme within the discipline of Architecture and to address the debate on one of the crucial issues of our time together with artists and scientists. In fact, the aim of the research is to consider energy as a poetic notion, in its wider cultural aspect: rather than focusing on the implications and the consequences of energy in relation to the built environment, the ambition is to consider the very notion of energy, before any conventional form of architectural application.
As Aldo Rossi described at the beginning of “Scientific Autobiography”: in every artist or scientist, the principle of continuation of energy is interlinked with the research of happiness and of death. Even in Architecture this research is related to the Material and to Energy, without this observation it is not possible to understand any construction neither from the static point of view nor from the formal point of view”.