Endless seas of solar panels: lining the hills, covering factory rooftops, set up along the roadside, lined up side by side for miles by the train tracks, focused on dish-shaped receiving towers, and finally arriving in the desert to deliver its harvest to a strange device that, through use of a lens, melts the sand until three-dimensional objects are created. If this special edition deals obsessively with photovoltaic fields, it is not only because it endeavours to offer post-Fukushima scenarios, but also because in reality the boom in this technology is becoming—has already become actually—an element in a radical transformation of the landscape. Acre upon acre of land has been covered with blackish-blue, geometric patterns, iridescent in the light, which sometimes seem like glamorous, vintage spaceships, something out of Star Wars, or are reminiscent of the regularity of greenhouses, but cultivate something a little bit sinister instead.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, it is not worth even bothering to recount the cat fights between the genre's promoters and its detractors. It is essential, however, to ask some questions about a few other, rather ambiguous, aspects about the phenomenon's spread.

Firstly, how much land has been consumed? And with what criteria? As reported in these pages, the case of Sicily—identified in European programmes as a privileged area for the development of solar energy along with Spain, the south of France and other countries bordering the Mediterranean—suggests many of the investments are aimed primarily at intercepting funding and incentives, effectively relegating the usefulness of the project and the public interest to a secondary role. In these cases, orange and almond groves have been sacrificed for a handful of megawatts, which are even superfluous. In contrast, the United States a controversy has been raised over the use of solar farms to 'cover up' huge, post-industrial areas on the outskirts of cities, operations that avoid expensive reclamation projects while maintaining an eco-friendly image. This stratification represents a logistical problem with almost philosophical implications in a world that no longer knows what to do with its waste, and keeps thousands of specialists (from engineers to organised crime) busy trying to find both the holes to fill up and the most innocent structures possible with which to hide them: houses, parks, and, the case in point, alternative energy.

But beyond the risks of contamination, in contrast to this 'logic of sweeping things under the carpet', the opposition primarily poses the question about the myth of growth: producing mountains of waste to be subsequently covered up with panels is an autistic response to an infinite loop that produces more and more junk, more and more energy. It is certainly important to begin making a few cracks in this loop and massively integrate it into policies of reduction and recycling. A second paradox involving photovoltaics revolves around this point: why has research in the field been focused for decades on the improving systems that enable on-demand delivery, 24 / 7? There is basically only one answer: to accommodate the peak demand for air conditioning in the evening. In other words we are investing valuable intellectual resources in highly-advanced green technology to satisfy a market based on antiquated technology and ways of living.

In the fields of architecture and building, on the other hand, there has been a proliferation of research on passive construction methods, materials and techniques able to retain heat in winter and coolness in summer, on strategies to recycle and reuse raw materials, structural elements, packaging, even the places themselves, in order to reduce the ecological (and economic) costs of transportation. What we are witnessing is the comeback of a body of knowledge and experimentation that had its heyday in the '70s, when the oil crisis brought every Western country to its knees. Back then, as seen in the exhibition Sorry, Out of Gas at the Canadian Centre of Architecture in 2007, unique solutions were invented to address the question of energy and its implications for the planet. Today it is part of a widespread culture, or is in the process of being expanded throughout all schools and studios, but also, and most importantly, throughout the business world and the entire production cycle from furniture to concrete. Fortunately, the same also applies to the renewable energy sector, where networks and organisations are beginning to crop up that deal with the life of panels after the death of the power plant, reusing them or dismantling them entirely.

In fact, for some years now—and it hasn't been very many actually—the first decommissioned plants have started to appear. The first solar fields have already entered the age of obsolescence, the first generation of photovoltaics has already become industrial archaeology. School children are taken to see ruins with landscapes made of half-broken pylons as if they were Ionic columns. Books about the forgotten wonders of the Soviet era illustrate solar farms in Kazakhstan along with monuments to Lenin. Like all landscapes of ancient ruins, regardless of their era, they eventually become sublime. Probably, when the true energy revolution comes into being, the one that will place renewable energy devices in every household and will spread panels and blades and other strange apparatus on every roof of every city, these mega-structures will seem like the first transistor computers that filled up room upon room and made horrendous amounts of noise. But for the time being, our eyes are still getting used to looking at the infinite reflections off a shiny, black-on-black grid.