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Seven
Days, June 28, 2004
Donald Maurice Kreis
Landscape
architect Jean Vissering of Montpelier laughs when asked to describe
a really beautiful wind turbine. What loyal Vermonter, with an
appreciation for the splendor of the Green Mountains, could take
pleasure at the prospect of festooning a pristine ridge with a series
of industrial towers as high as a 25-story building?
Vissering
can – which is why her laughter is not derisive but, rather, slightly
nervous. Wind energy – more specifically, helping Vermont grapple
with the visual impacts of wind turbines – has been a big part of
Vissering’s work for several years. “I’m working both sides of
the question,” she confesses. She got into it by preparing a report
for the Vermont Department of Public Service two years ago. Now
she counts among her paying clients a company seeking to expand
Vermont’s only currently operating commercial generator of wind
power,. She is also working with a town trying to decide whether
to oppose a different facility proposed within its borders.
Hence,
before she gets to the question of beauty, Vissering stresses what
ought to be an obvious point: that a beautiful thing in the wrong
place is an abomination. “You wouldn’t want to see the Vermont
State House on top of Camel’s Hump,” she reminds.
Nor
will any wind turbines end up there, even with Vermont in the throes
of figuring out how to meet the state’s official goal of meeting
five percent of its energy needs by harnessing the wind. The engineers
and economists have figured out that wind turbines in Vermont need
to live at elevations of between 2,500 and 3,500 feet, on ridges
that are broad enough to support multiple towers. Camel’s Hump
(elevation 4,083 feet) is out, as is Mount Ascutney (elevation 3,150
feet, but too pointy).
Something
relatively flat would work best – like the Acropolis. Fittingly,
it is with reference to classical notions of beauty that Vissering
finally gets down to conjuring a picture of wind turbines that delight
rather than annoy. “There’s something very clear and positive
about those sleek, white columns,” the landscape architect asserts,
something that would justify regarding properly sited wind power
facilities a “Greek temples to the gods of wind.”
Nor
is Vissering the only design professional in Vermont who finds artistic
virtue in these outsized propellers. “What’s really kind of mesmerizing
is the movement,” insists Donna Leban, the South Burlington architect
who is president of the Vermont chapter of the American Institute
of Architects (AIA). “It kind of takes you away from your everyday
thinking.”
Leban,
whose usual specialty is lighting design, has staked her presidency
on wind. Soon after she took office last year, she rallied the
Vermont AIA chapter at the request of Bernie Sanders to conduct
what amounts to a statewide discussion of aesthetics. Sanders
was seeking to resolve a dilemma faced by many alternative energy
enthusiasts in Vermont: figuring out how to reconcile the lure
of wind as one of the most renewable of renewable energy resources
with the obvious visual changes wind turbines bring to the natural
environment that renewable energy advocates are trying to save.
What
emerged was an official statement Leban read at a news conference
called by Sanders in March. “We all know that beauty is in the
eye of the beholder,” Leban declared. “Can wind turbines lined
up on a ridge be beautiful? Many people, including many architects,
think so.”
Calling
for the aesthetic questions to be “placed in the larger context
of our limited choices for energy to fuel our modern lifestyles,”
the AIA Vermont president singled out for praise Vermont’s only
wind power facility currently producing electricity for public distribution–
the eleven turbines that Green Mountain Power placed on a ridgeline
in Searsburg visible from Route 9 as one heads east from Bennington.
“I look at the Searsburg wind farm not only with admiration of
the elegant forms set in nature, but with great hope for our future
and that of generations to come,” she said.
Opponents
of wind power will find little comfort in the larger world of architecture,
where those whose fame and/or PhDs depend on an ability to pontificate
about aesthetics. For example, the prestigious architecture journal
2G from Spain recently devoted an entire issue to “Architecture
and Energy.” The lead article, by Professor Michael Jakob of the
Geneva University Institute of Architecture, refers to a “new visibility,”
the idea of “electricity as text” and power facilities becoming
“unassimilated signs of the modern . . . as diffuse components of
an unstable, deficient system, at least from a semiotic and cultural
point of view.”
Translation:
In the digital age, electricity is more essential than ever and
it is artistically appropriate to force people to confront the reality
of energy production. Wind turbines are beautiful for the same
reason that Alexander Calder’s mobiles are. Unlike essentially
all other human-built objects attached to the earth, wind turbines
are in motion and the movement is a direct reflection of a natural
force. Jakob also sees artistic as well as moral virtue here,
contrasting this reality with Chernobyl, far removed from the consumers
of its energy and ultimately “the tragic emblem of an absolute invisibility
that has now become impossible.” Come to think of it, Vermont
Yankee is invisible from I-91 as well.
Whether
you buy 2G ’s semiotic thesis, it is difficult to argue
with its arresting photographs of the wind farm in Tarifa, in the
Cadiz province of Spain. These turbines overlook the Strait of
Gibraltar, standing like sentinels against a sharp blue sky and
the not-so-distant African continent – a landscape rich with symbolism
as well as splendor.
Back
on this side of the Atlantic, so many of New England’s architectural
symbols arise out of efforts to address the economic challenges
of their time with the technology then available, from the lighthouse
to the grist mill. Even the classic New England connected farm
house was an ingenius effort to save energy by eliminating the need
to walk outside to the barn or the outhouse in winter.
Wind
farm opponents point out that even lighthouses do not rise to 330
feet, which is the height (measured from the ground to the top of
each rotating blade at its apex) of the turbines Central Vermont
Public Service Corporation hopes to build on Glebe Mountain in Londonderry.
That’s more than 100 feet taller than the turbines in Searsburg.
A
forceful rebuttal comes from Keith Dewey of Weston, an architect
who specializes in sustainable buildings. “If there’s no frame
of reference as to scale,” Dewey argues, “the human mind doesn’t
make a good connection to what the height really is.” This is
why they told him in architecture school to put human figures in
his renderings, and this is why Dewey contends that no one will
much care how tall wind turbines really are.
Dewey,
who counts no wind farmers among his clients, is nevertheless so
empassioned about wind power that he founded an informal group called
Fair Wind Vermont to argue with project opponents, whom he dismisses
as “well-funded aristocrats” who simply want nothing but nature
to be visible from their patios. Dewey and his fellow Vermont
architects helped fend off legislative efforts earlier this year
to impose a moratorium on wind energy projects.
“I
love to look at modern windmills,” Dewey proclaims. When he does,
he thinks about his two kids, 14 and 16, and the image of them being
drafted some day to fight wars over mideast oil. That’s the image
he is comparing with the “simple, clean and graceful form and kinetic
movement” of the wind farms, whose sleek, three-bladed, form has
emerged after years of tinkering by the manufacturers as the one
that works best technologically.
Apart
from symbolism and iconography, what makes a work of architecture
appealing is the play between unity and variety. Think of Moshe
Safdie’s famous Habitat housing complex in Montreal – the uniformity
of concrete boxes and the delightfulness of their seemingly haphazard
arrangement. Consider, too, a field of daisies, for what makes
the tension between unity and variety compelling is that it is borrowed
from nature. Visually speaking, and assuming Dewey is right about
scale, turbines along a ridgeline are not unlike flowers on a hillside.
That
will be no comfort to those who want to gaze only upon real flowers.
But it raises the possibility that what some view now as ridgeline
blight will be tomorrow’s image of what was truly memorable about
what we are building today.
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