Last year, Enerdrape have been selected to showcase a project co-developed with GEOEG at the 2021 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (SBAU). After a year of work and preparation, we are delighted to announce that our pavilion was successfully installed in Seoul, South Korea and ready to welcome visitors !
The project is entitled “CHICAGO: Cooling and Heating Interventions in Chicago Achieved via Geothermal Opportunities” and proposes a visionary energy transformation for the city through the conversion of all the underground tunnels present underneath our feet into livable spaces and renewable geothermal energy sources.
This visionary project transforms the
underground built environments beneath
Chicago into spaces that can power the city
as energy geostructures: earth-contact
structures that can exchange heat, continuously and irrespective of the weather, with the ground and the people moving therein.
This visionary, yet realizable project, will showcase the untapped potential that lies in our cities undergrounds. Starting from tomorrow, the visionary urban intervention proposed for the city of Chicago may disrupt many cities around the globe !
Why Chicago ?
As one of the densest American cities, Chicago suffers from torrid summers and freezing winters. Greatly as a result of this climate, the city has tremendous thermal energy requirements, which currently contribute to 71% of the citywide CO2 emissions due to reliance on non-renewable energy sources. Such emissions cause global warming, requiring a paradigm shift to avert catastrophic results of climate change.
The central theme of the Biennale being Resilience, the city of Chicago allows to prove the resilience of our energy intervention against its harsh climate conditions.
The underground offers Chicago and all cities a critical attribute: resilience.
The underground provides energy supply resilience because it contains a continuously available source of renewable heating and cooling: geothermal energy.
By transforming underground built environments into heat exchangers, the underground spaces are used as spaces that can supply the city in energy.
The Pavilion
