BESS Landscapes Thesis

Project Description
Studio 4A and 4B; The growing climate crisis requires our attention. How can Landscape Architects improve the future of Ireland‘s biggest renewable energy generator: Wind Energy? An ongoing experiment in the conjoining of felids to solve the harder climate issues.
Brief
The UCD Progressive Landscape Laboratory within the premises of the UCD Landscape Architecture Section. The objective of each Design Research Studio is to formulate and present a vibrant and compelling design-research outcome that acknowledges and addresses the identified problems within specific project sites or geographies. The outcomes aim to demonstrate and illustrate an improved future for the chosen locations.
Unfortunately, another deadly war had to break out, in this case Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, before European governments finally realized that the thinking and economics of fossil-fuel based systems and societies lead to an impasse. This impasse is both ecological and economic in nature. Virtually every technical matter that we take for granted in our everyday lives is connected in some way to the fossil fuel industry. We assume that it will no longer be necessary to explain to our university students that the burning of fossil commodities leads to enormous CO2 emissions and that this leads to significant warming of the global climate. If one thing is certain, it is the need to design, build and fully transition to renewable energy systems in the future. In the European context, these are primarily wind energy, solar energy, hydroelectric power and geothermal energy.
In Ireland, the winds of change ‘the energy transition‘ took a big step forward in May 2023. EirGrid announced the results of the first nationwide offshore electricity generation auction. While it was somewhat surprising that SSE Renewables’ Arklow Bank project was unsuccessful in this round, the project features still the country’s only existing offshore turbines to date. Tailwind for Ireland studio series (2023-2024) you will work on your bachelor’s thesis. This thesis is synonymous with the end result – the final submission, exhibition and documentation – of your final design studio in the four-year landscape architecture degree program. You decide for yourself what exactly your personal hypothesis is, but it must relate to the described context of Studio 4A as well as to the topic of renewable energies
and the associated infrastructure. The primary location of your project is Ireland, but you can also develop a reference to the European or even global context.