Design Earth

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Led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Design Earth examines the geographies of urban systems—such as energy, trash, water, and agriculture—to prompt the debate on the techno-environment in the age of climate change. The design research practice has exhibited its works at the Venice Biennale and other leading international architecture events and has received numerous accolades, including the Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Faculty Design Awards, and the Jacques Rougerie Foundation’s First Prize. Their After Oil project was collected by MoMA.

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Ghosn and Jazairy each hold Doctor of Design degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they founded the journal New Geographies and were the respective editors for NG2: Landscapes of Energy and NG4: Scales of the Earth. They have authored the Graham Foundation grant-supported Geostories (Actar, 2018) and Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015) as well as recent essays and projects published in Domus, Science Fiction Studies, Volume, Journal of Architectural Education, San Rocco, Avery Review, Thresholds, Bracket, and Perspecta, among others. Ghosn is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture + Planning, and Jazairy is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

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Geostories

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How do we make sense of the Earth at a moment in which it is presented in crisis? Geostories is a manifesto on 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. 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. The architectural project 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.