HOW MUCH ENERGY COULD AN ORGANISATION SAVE if the heating, air conditioning and power consumption were regulated according to the number of people in the building? How much additional value could building owners generate if they had a more accurate picture of the way their services were being consumed and could charge tenants accordingly?

The Swiss architect Fritz Haller was the most established system designer in switzerland during the 1960s. His urban megastructures, network structures, geometrical experiments, and particularly his USM Haller furniture collection are a well-known reference in architecture. From current information technology point of view it is attractive for us to re-think and re-interpret Fritz Haller's architectural key concepts, as well as his architectural terminology, such as node, network, or system.

Under the name "digitalSTROM.org" an alliance was created at ETH Zurich, with the goal to develop a worldwide standard for electrical intelligence. Basis for this is a new chip - developed with the collaboration of ETH Professor Ludger Hovestadt - a chip with a large potential for saving electricity. ...>>