The festival centrepiece
Why a pylon?
A dramatic, shiny pylon is the centrepiece of the Birmingham climate change festival. It has been installed in Victoria Square for nine days.
The pylon brings home the reality of climate change – it makes the issue of climate change visible and local. It isn’t just happening far from home and in the future: it’s happening here and now.
The pylon has been installed by festival organisers Birmingham City Council and CABE as a challenge to the way our towns and cities work. It has been transformed by the design team, Block Architecture, Packman Lucas and XCO2 Energy.
Pylons allow our cities to use energy without seeing the chimneys and cooling towers of the power station. Like so many things in our lives these days, they illustrate how the consequences of our choices are hidden from us. This structure is an impossible-to-ignore reminder that we need to change. But the designers, Block Architecture, have transformed the pylon to suggest that change could be for the better.
This is the first time that a pylon has been seen in a city centre. It even looks “lifted” straight from its usual home, the field, into a city square – it comes complete with its corn base.
The climate change festival has been designed to make the invisible (carbon emissions) visible, and the idea lies at the heart of our problem with energy: we are rarely conscious of how much we use.
A steely reminder
The pylon is a steely reminder that our consumption of power is an issue – but so too is its distribution. We burn fossil fuels for electricity, transmit it long distances, then use it inefficiently, losing up to as much as 97 per cent of the energy along the way. That’s a huge amount of climate-changing gases for relatively little power.
Pylons will always be needed – they transport power from a wind farm just as they do from a nuclear power station. But we need to think about generating much more energy locally - and Birmingham has made a good start, with some highly effective district heating systems in the city centre.
A symbol of consumption, the pylon acts as a reminder of how much we need to reduce the amount we consume. And not just energy. Its massive structure poses some brutal questions about the kind of unlimited consumption of all kinds which dominated the prodigal last century.
The beautiful pylon with its special coating offers bright, optimistic answers. Ultimately, the pylon is surreal art. The surrealists were interested in the power of dreams, and what they revealed – because dreams are free of convention. They aimed to liberate, the imagination and liberate people from the status quo.
It is interesting that the word ‘pylon’ comes from the Greek work meaning gateway. This festival urges people to dare to dream. Because business as usual is no longer an option.
