Make the Invisible Visible

What is your background and research interest?
Angela Lee : I am an architect practising in France and a professor of architecture. Over the past few years my research has focused on biodiversity in the built environment. My main focus is on bridging academic research and real world application. One key lesson I’ve drawn from building an experimental system that integrates pollinators, plants, and animals into architecture is that there is a lot of misunderstanding around what sustainability really means.

What can you tell us about the project you plan to pursue during your fellowship?W
Angela Lee : My academic work has increasingly turned to the things we cannot see – energy flows and other forms of “metabolism” that underpin built environments. The project I will develop at RIFS is called Tracing Invisible Infrastructure and will analyse hidden energy networks as socio-ecological infrastructures with political and cultural consequences.

How do you approach the topic? 
Angela Lee : I start by “tracing” the invisible – mapping energy flows, extraction processes, and the geo‑resources and socio-political agents that sustain them. This links directly to the geoscientific research carried out at the GFZ (German Research Centre for Geosciences). As architects, like many others, we hear a lot about sustainable energy, but often in a somewhat abstract way. I’m trying to transform that abstraction into a tangible experience—something we can see, touch, and feel in the real world. The challenge is to synthesize insights from diverse experts, which I do by translating interviews into sectional drawings—visualizations common in both architecture and geology. For example, when looking at what lies beneath our feet, a geochemist sees decay and interactions over deep time, while a sociologist sees abstract geopolitical relationships.

So, you see a building not just as a structure, but as a living organism?
Angela Lee : Precisely. I view buildings as networks of metabolic processes. Built environments are representations of abstract forces —policies, culture, economics, and technologies – so the question is: how does the movement toward sustainability manifest in the real world, and how do we experience it on a personal level?
 

You mentioned an experimental building project in Paris. Can you tell us more about that?
Angela Lee : It was an office building incorporating a facade system designed to support birdlife, insects, and even a rooftop forest. While the building itself is interesting, the real value was the process – a truly transdisciplinary design involving ecologists, soil specialists, engineers, and more. This project led me to later reflections such as: What is the aesthetic of so-called “sustainable design” and its embedded resource consumption? How do we navigate between global and local resources for the energy transition in a changing world?

What can the audience expect from your contribution to this year's Berlin Science Week?
Angela Lee : At our event “Tracing the Invisible” at Berlin Science Week, we aim to engage people beyond the expert community. We’re focusing on finding accessible language and creating a dialogue between different perspectives. I’ll be starting with simple, relatable questions to connect everyone to the topic. Questions like: “Do you feel warm or cold in this room?” The workshop aims to understand how people perceive energy in a material sense, moving beyond data and graphs.

What does RIFS offer you that other institutions cannot?
Angela Lee: RIFS brings together an extraordinary mix of disciplines – people approaching energy from diverse angles, including a crucial sociological perspective. My work has always involved participatory design and community engagement, and RIFS prioritizes that as well. Second, the connection with the GFZ is invaluable. I appreciate this bridge between social science and geoscience, as my architectural work sits right in between – blending philosophical ideas, social-spatial organization, geomaterials, and energy systems.

The event at Berlin Science Week (registration required):  Tracing the Invisible