Master of Urban Design Program lecture: Rania Ghosn
How does the architectural imagination make sense of the Earth at a moment in which the planet is in crisis? In Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment, research practice DESIGN EARTH deploys the speculative project to make visible and public the climate crisis. The talk is organized into three sections: terrarium, aquarium, planetarium. Each revisits media devices to illustrate the power of architectural representation, be it a drawing, a model, or a material archive in reassembling publics around representations of the Earth. The architectural project becomes a medium to synthesize spatial knowledge across scales and to speculate on how to live with many forms of environmental externalities, including oil extraction, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, air pollution, space debris, and a host of other social-ecological issues.
Rania Ghosn
Rania Ghosn is an associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding partner with El Hadi Jazairy of DESIGN EARTH. The design research practice employs the speculative architecture project as a medium to make public the climate crisis. The work of DESIGN EARTH is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection and has been widely published and exhibited internationally, including recently at the Venice Biennial, Shenzhen Biennial, V&A Museum, Bauhaus Museum Dessau, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Matadero Madrid. They are the authors of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (third edition, 2022; 2018), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), Geographies of Trash (2015), and the forthcoming Climate Inheritance (2023). Ghosn holds a doctorate in design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2010), where she was a founding member of the journal New Geographies and editor in chief of its issue Landscapes of Energy (2010). She is a recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship (2022), the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers (2016), and the ACSA Faculty Design Awards (2014, 2017) for outstanding work in environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.