revoir les infrastructures
énergétiques

From 23 May to 4 June 2025

Organised by EDF Pulse Design

Project managers
Diane Beaulieu
Aurore Galli
Axel Morales

Associated artists, landscape architects and designers
Arthur-Donald Bouillé
Marianne Cardon
Tom Garçon
Apolline Labarrière
Claire Laubie
Marie-Eve Millasseau
Camille Riou

Often invisible in our daily lives, electricity becomes tangible through the infrastructures that criss-cross our territories. Through their presence and function, they shape our lifestyles, our economy and our society. Since the 1950s, with the major dams in the Alps, and especially since the Messmer Plan of 1974, France has opted for large centralised infrastructures - hydroelectric and nuclear - to build a predominantly low-carbon energy mix that has left a lasting mark on its regions.

Today, with the development of renewable energies (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, small-scale hydro), smaller-scale facilities are springing up all over the place. However, these new infrastructures, although numerous, are rarely designed with the same attention to landscape, location or architecture as the major facilities of the past.

In the autumn of 2023, a team of designers from EDF Pulse Design and landscape architects from the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles went out to meet the everyday life of these small infrastructures. The aim of the trip was to understand how these elements blend into their environment, forging links with the land, its inhabitants and, more broadly, with the living world.

This first "nose on the infrastructures" look gave rise to ideas and hypotheses for designing these facilities differently. Three key issues emerged: the services they provide to the region and its residents, their integration into heterogeneous environments, and anticipating and reducing their impact, particularly on the environment.

The exhibition retraces this observation, highlights inspiring projects from a variety of backgrounds, and suggests practical ways of imagining energy infrastructures that forge genuine links with local areas and contribute to their identity.

This exhibition is the result of an initial phase of research into the issues of acceptance, consultation and integration of energy infrastructures carried out by the EDF Pulse Design team, the integrated design laboratory of the EDF Group’s Innovation Division.