Rania Ghosn - Associate Professor, MIT - "Geostories"
Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and founding partner with El Hadi Jazairy of the studio DESIGN EARTH. Their practice engages the speculative project as a medium to make public the climate crisis and the technological systems that underpin it. The work of DESIGN EARTH is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection and has been widely exhibited, including recently at venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. They are authors of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), Geographies of Trash (2015), and the forthcoming Climate Inheritance (2023). Ghosn holds a Doctor of Design degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2010), where she was founding member of the journal New Geographies and editor-in-chief of its issue Landscapes of Energy (2010). She is recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship (2022), the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers (2016), and ACSA Faculty Design Awards (2014, 2017) for outstanding work in environmental design fields as a critical endeavor. (From Event Page Website)
Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment by
How do we make sense of the Earth at a moment in which it is presented in crisis? Geostories is a manifesto for the environmental imagination that renders sensible the issues of climate change and through geographic fiction invites readers to relate to the complexity of Earth systems in their vast scales of time and space. The series of architectural projects becomes a medium to synthesize different forms and scales of knowledge on technological externalities, such as oil extraction, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, water shortage, air pollution, trash, space debris, and a host of other social-ecological issues. The book is organized into three sections-terrarium, aquarium, planetarium, each of which revisits such devices of wonder that assemble publics around representations of the Earth. Through design research, Geostories brings together spatial history, geographic representation, projective design, and material public assemblies to speculate on ways of living with such legacy technologies on the planet.
New Geographies: 08, Island by
As a master metaphor, the island has been a fecund source of inspiration across many domains. From More's Utopia to Darwin's evolutionary theory to Ungers's archipelago, insights derived from "island thinking" are commonly extrapolated across diverse scales and fields. The appeal of the island metaphor lies in its capacity to simplify the complex and frame the apparently unbounded. Yet the concept seems to contradict current mainstream thought and practice in geographic and design fields. The globalization motifs of openness and interconnectedness, and ecology's privilege of environmental processes and flows over forms and boundaries, both challenge the pertinence of the island as a cognitive device for territorial description and intervention. New Geographies, 8 proposes an epistemological pulse between, on the one hand, the ultimate loss of the exterior implied in planetary upscaling of territorial interpretations (toward an idea of the world as a whole) and, on the other hand, the need to rearrange new boundaries in an environment viewed through the process-oriented lens of ecology. An "atlas" of islands, New Geographies, 8 explores the new limits of islandness and gathers examples to reassert its relevance for design disciplines.
Urbanisation of the Sea by
Chapter 20 Aquarium for the anthropocene / Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy (Design Earth).
Positions on Emancipation by
Is there a place for architecture beyond neoliberal paradigms? While our era of constant crisis demands stronger social and political engagement, architecture has been largely characterized by a lack of strong positions during the last decades. But more recently, one can again observe attitudes that claim to address architecture and urbanism as more engaged with the social and political effects of global capitalism. Against the liberal 'anything goes' and the revival of architectural autonomy, these attitudes believe less in the possibility for even the most experimental architectural object to have a changing effect on society. Their approaches instead vary from activism to the construction of new critical narratives. But how do these attitudes emancipate themselves from capitalism and to what extent are they able to take into account the complexities of the sociopolitical, economical, ecological, and cultural aspects of the production of space? This book relays a passionate debate between some of the most outstanding theoreticians and eloquent protagonists of this new attitude, leaving us with an overview of such postulated ambitions. A debate with Anne-Julchen Bernhardt, Arno Brandlhuber, Gilles Delalex, Manuel Gausa, Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy, Adrian Lahoud, Bart Lootsma, Markus Miessen, Can Onaner, Laurent Stalder, Peter Swinnen, Pelin Tan, Milica Topalovic, Stephan Truby, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, and Paola Vigano.
