The project envisions a counterfactual reality in which the city of Paris would have transitioned to solar energy at the end of the 19th Century. France, disadvantaged during the industrialization due to its too scarce coal resources, would have shifted to an energy that could be cultivated indigenously: the sun.

Augustin Mouchot’s solar engine, the first engine to produce energy from solar radiation, would have been the instrument to achieve autarchic energy production. Deriving from the archaic principle of Archimedes’ burning mirror dating back to Antiquity, Mouchot’s engine initiated a series of solar innovations culminating in the concentrating solar power stations we know today. Coinciding with the re-transfiguration of Paris during the Haussmann era for, among other, military and hygiene purposes, the project imagines Paris being rebuilt also according to energetic purposes.

A declination of Mouchot’s engines becomes an integral component of the Haussmann building. Sustaining itself and alimenting the public grid, the block is one entity of a wider system. Eventually, one must ask, if a solar transition were to have happened over a century ago, how better off would Paris be today?