Sonic Acts 2020: DESIGN EARTH: Rania Ghosn – Geostories

Sonic Acts Podcast

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 DESIGN EARTH: Rania Ghosn – Geostories 23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Architects Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy co-founded DESIGN EARTH to engage with geography in addressing humanity’s relationship to the Earth through architecture. From Monaco to Mexico City, their research develops projects around concepts such as hypothetical volcanos, the ​‘Pacific Cemetery’ where satellites go to die and a methane aviary as waste disposal unit rendering gas pipes a forest for birds. Rania Ghosn (DESIGN EARTH) begins her lecture Geostories with the question: How might the geographic imagination convert into an image and narrative of the climate crisis? That is, not only as a calamity of the physical environment, but also as a predicament of the cultural one – of the systems of representation through which society relates to complex and unknown environmental futures. In Geostories, geographic fiction becomes a medium to synthesise different forms and scales of knowledge on technological externalities, such as oil extraction, deep-sea mining, space debris and a host of other social-ecological issues, and to speculate on ways of living with such legacy technologies on the planet. The collaborative practice DESIGN EARTH based in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Cambridge, Massachusetts and is led by architects Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy. DESIGN EARTH literally means ​‘earth-writing’, deploying geographic aesthetics as a form of environmental speculation in the age of climate change. The practice received a Young Architects prize from the Architectural League of New York and DESIGN EARTH have been commissioned by the Venice Architecture Biennale, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism and Oslo Architecture Triennale. Projects have been exhibited in international art spaces such as SFMOMA and Times Museum, Guangzhou and acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art. Ghosn is an Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning and Jazairy is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at University of Michigan. They co-authored Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2018), ​‘a manifesto for the environmental imagination’, and Geographies of Trash (2015).