While several national and international organizations highlight the significance of energy in addressing climate change and sustainable development, energy remains one component of modern world that is obscure. There is an urgency to understand energy and its implications in every field including architecture and articulate what role architecture can play in transition to clean and affordable energy. While architecture can play an active role in transitioning to decarbonized energy systems and harnessing technology, it can also be critical in thinking about how we understand energy beyond quick fixes. It is necessary to study how energy has come to be incorporated and internalized in architectural thought and consider the agency of architectural imagination for a world in transition. Making Energy Visible addresses this urgency by bringing together interpretations, representations, and visualizations of energy across various mediums of architecture from building to drawing, and by initiating public conversations.

Tülay Atak is an architect, an architectural historian, and theorist. Her research focuses on the intersection between environmental history and architecture. She curated an exhibition Energy at the Threshold of the Visible World at the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab in Vienna (2024). Her coedited book, Pedagogical Experiments in Architecture for a Changing Climate (Routledge, 2024), brings together essays by architectural educators addressing climate crisis. She received her bachelor’s degree at METU in Ankara, Turkey, and pursued her PhD at University of California, Los Angeles, with the dissertation, “Byzantine Modern: Displacements of Modernism in Istanbul.” In addition to her dissertation, she coauthored the book, Fragile City (MER, 2016). Her scholarship has appeared in journals and edited volumes such as Architectural Theory Review, OASE Journal of Architecture, Future Anterior, PMLA, Journal of Architecture Education, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Invention d’une Architecte, and Construction Savante. She has taught at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Cornell University, the Rhode Island School of Design, The Cooper Union, and divides her time between Pratt Institute, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Angewandte in Vienna.