ABSTRACT
By architect Kiel Moe, the reader gets an even more critical view of conventional engineering standards of efficiency. Moe also embraces complexity theory, but argues that the technocratic culture of building energy simulation and energy coding is both epistemologically and ontologically flawed. With regard to epistemology Moe finds that the simulation tools now used by architects provide false certainty because they measure abstract, closed systems that cannot exist in reality. With regard to ontology, Moe finds that decision-making on the grounds of a simulated model leads to answers that are not only naively reductive, but that favor the interests of model-makers themselves. The argument in Moe's analysis is not that energy simulators are consciously corrupt, but that their well-intended efforts to grapple with the problem of climate change fail to recognize the politics embedded in their calculations.
