"Feeling the Energy" in Milan — LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AOTEAROA

CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati and architect Italo Rota transformed Milan’s Botanical Garden into an energy park for Milan Design Week 2022, showcasing sustainable energy.

Feeling the Energy, developed for Plentitude, created a sensorial path from 500 metres of digitally bent copper pipe, allowing visitors to explore a range of sustainable energy production and consumption forms.

The project’s six main stages- Energy Carousel, Garden Orchestra, The Leading Logo, Powering Vibrations, Blinds in the Sun and Solar Garden, show how energy can be produced from the wind, sun and movement.

Each step features a different copper object, a kind of energy-generating sculpture, and the installation harvests energy during the day to store in a network of small batteries and illuminate the Botanical Garden at night.

It also powers the water vaporisers that cool the pathways and nourish the vegetation, with sensors misting the paths when people walk past them.

“The installation is inspired by the functioning of plant organisms,” says Carlo Ratti, founding partner at CRA and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab. “As trees in a forest draw energy from different sources and then use it locally where they need it - in a certain branch or the end of a leaf - the long copper tube of ‘Feeling the Energy’ absorbs energy in its entire length and then uses it in specific points of the installation path.”

A carousel demonstrating energy in motion greets visitors as they arrive, and from there they can wander under a series of portals that play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, performed by the Ensemble Strumentale la Barocca of the Symphony Orchestra of Milan.

The exhibition path includes a giant vibraphone for visitors to play, and a tunnel with coloured diaphragms covered with organic photovoltaic panels can be opened and closed by those moving through it. A canopy features sensors that detect human presence and activate a cool mist.

"Playing is a fundamental activity for every human being. This installation suggests new links between play and the world of energy. It shows us that every time we consume energy - whether it's on a carousel or a swing, or even while producing sound waves - we can recover some of that energy. In addition, the installation hints closely at the theme of efficiency. A simple gesture such as orienting the photovoltaic panels allows us to think practically about saving and optimizing resources," says Italo Rota, founder of Italo Rota Building Office.

Client Plentitude is a branch of power company Eni that functions as the outpost for its decarbonisation strategy.

“The Plenitude project illustrates what a self-sufficient energy infrastructure looks like, where discrete points are connected in a microgrid,” say CRA. “The installation reproduces, on a small scale, what happens with urban, national and even transcontinental energy networks: complex distribution channels are able to connect and supply each node over a long journey.”