Book Review

Wind Power in View: Energy Landscapes in a Crowded World

By Martin J. Pasqualetti et al.
San Diego, California: Academic Press, 2002.
234 pages; $59.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Laurie Kerr

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, and yet… it never quite happens. Despite wind power’s tremendous potential, its growth remains stunted by unresolved aesthetic issues. Just witness the latest furors over the siting of windmills off the coast of Nantucket and in upstate New York. In an attempt to move beyond the aesthetic impasse, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a workshop at which experts from various disciplines grappled with the problem for ten days. Wind Power in View, a collection of essays, is the tangible product of this effort.

The book is an indispensable disappointment. In providing a sustained, book-length exploration of the aesthetics of wind, it accords due importance to the problem, and the essays manage to address most of the salient issues. Hence, the book is certain to be an important resource. But even though some of the essays are exemplary, too many are repetitive and rambling. Since no attempt is made to connect them into a thematic discourse until Gordon G. Brittan, Jr.’s excellent final summary, the reader is left to wander aimlessly through a maze of opinions.

More disturbing is the frequent lack of respect for public sentiment. Many of the essayists write off the aesthetic problems of wind to the urban public’s outdated, romantic view of the rural landscape. To be fair, these essays do elucidate the changing uses and meanings of the countryside. But profound shifts of meaning occur slowly and unpredictably, so it’s a good bet that wind power will not benefit from a head-to-head contest with the pastoral, the beautiful, or the sentimental – at least for the foreseeable future. If the wind industry wants to win friends and influence people, it needs to solve wind’s aesthetic problems and to learn to work with the public.

Three of the book’s essays directly confront the political and aesthetic issues of wind, making valuable contributions. Gordon G. Brittan, Jr., a philosopher, analyzes why modern windmills are alien and threatening, and describes how they could be designed and sited to be more connected to the places they inhabit. Frode Birk Nielsen, a Danish landscape architect who has designed some magnificent windmill installations, describes the aesthetic, financial, and political thinking that underlies the exemplary Danish story. Here aesthetic issues are taken very seriously and the local public is involved in both siting and financing the projects.  Finally, Paul Gipe, a wind energy advocate, analyzes the aesthetics of windmill installations in exacting detail, listing no less than 38 distinct aesthetic principles.

There are lessons, then, to be gleaned from this important, unfocussed book. Wind power can and will succeed when the aesthetic and political concerns are taken as seriously as the technical and financial ones. But the technocrats must collaborate with the designers, and the companies must work with the communities in order for that to happen.

Laurie Kerr, AIA is an architect in New York City.