KOOZ How would you define Design Earth as a practice?

DE Design Earth engages the speculative architectural project as medium for making visible and public the geographies of the climate crisis. We use the architectural drawing to visualize how urban systems change the Earth and speculate on ways of living with legacy technologies, such as oil fields and landfills, on a damaged planet.

KOOZ What prompted the book "Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment"?

DE Our design research practice design explores aesthetic forms to fathom a phenomenon as indescribable as climate change. We were asking ourselves how we can respond to the environmental crisis, which is not only be a crisis of the physical environment but also a crisis of the cultural one—of the stories and images through which society relates to nature and the environment. It is a crisis, we thought, that requires a renewed media strategy that mobilize the popular imaginaries and actions for political changes.

The book Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (now in its second edition) brings together a set of fourteen Design Earth speculative projects, each of which presents previously unaccounted for spaces of technological externalities, such as landfills, soil erosion, freshwater shortage, ocean acidification and deep-sea mining, air pollution, space debris, and other chronic social-ecological issues. The environmental crisis, we argue, might not only be a crisis of the physical environment but also a crisis of the cultural one—of the stories and images through which society relates to nature and the environment. It is a crisis that requires a renewed media strategy that mobilize the popular imaginaries and generate the necessary dramatic “plot” that would be affectively compelling for a general public. The aesthetic task of “earth design,” we think, is to render the geographies of climate change perceptible by turning them into living images, creating an equivalent of ancient mythology.

KOOZ What is for you the value of research for the architectural discipline and beyond?

DE Design research is our method to engage with such critical issues of our time. Beyond the discrete ambitions of each project, we view our body of work as a quest to iteratively articulate the architectural project as a form of critical environmental practice and to establish a corresponding design research method through which to articulate new types of insight and knowledge on ecological matters of concern. In our first book, Geographies of Trash (2016), we articulates an architectural design-research methodology that can be understood in terms of the following four ambitions: 1) to construct the environmental technology in question as a spatial project by drawing on literature from geography, landscape, urbanism, and environmental studies; 2) to represent the technological system across scales in maps and diagrams by using visual representation to identify key sites and issues of concern; 3) to project speculative design visions, which, rather than solutions that continue to conceal such matter from public life, are provocations to bring forth the tensions among space, power, and technology; 4) to re-assemble the exploded black box of technology and assemble a public around the work through exhibitions, installations, and presentations.

KOOZ How does you practice approach the role and power of architecture in addressing the climate crisis?

DE We use the architectural project—as expounded through drawings, narratives, and artifacts—to make legible the systems, spaces, and scales that underpin the present climate crisis and to prompt debate both within and beyond the discipline. The premise of this work is that the architectural project, as an aesthetic practice, can galvanize an essential shift towards public communication that explicates climate change as it anticipates other possible worlds. Architecture needs to play its critical role, mobilize responsible citizens and lead the transformation of the planet.

KOOZ What informed the three sections of "terrarium, aquarium, planetarium" according to which the project is structured?

DE The book is organized into three sections: terrarium, aquarium, and planetarium, each of which revisits these “devices of wonder” to solicit their future roles in assembling publics around stories of the Earth. This form of communication addresses environmental matters by sharing them in recognizable and popular media formats. Such aesthetic assemblies are microcosms that channel our cultural enchantment with natural history, cabinets of curiosities, and other devices of wonder that sought to make sense of, the inaccessible and expansive scales of the Earth––the earth crust, sea and outer space. Because such “museums of nature” are visited across political party lines, they could potentially become democratic institutions where a ‘common sense’ of climate change is built and its political imaginary constructed.

The power of such affective experience could bring scientific facts to public knowledge and action! Of course, the curatorial and design challenge for these institutions is to continue to engage the difficult but necessary task of conceiving anew the representations of Nature currently on display in their galleries.

KOOZ The book is structured so that every page features both a text extract and a visual, how important is the "visual" as a tool for the architect?

DE Technical indices of environmental destruction alone have failed to generate the necessary dramatic “plot” that would be affectively compelling for a general public. A drawing is an argument about the world; it is at once descriptive, synthetic, critical, and always speculative. A great fellow geographer Alexander von Humboldt referred to his drawings as “a microcosm on a sheet of paper” and this is how we like to think of our drawings; they make visible geographies, synthesizes sciences and scales of knowledge on complex environmental issues, and engages actors and scales otherwise unaddressed. Furthermore, drawings make worlds: they weave materials and meanings into a complex and relational fabulation. Beyond documentary descriptions, geostories deploy a narrative sensibility to engage the conditions surrounding us. Drawings make worlds possible!

KOOZ What informs and defines the visual language of "Design Earth"?

DE Our projects give monumental form to the often-unseen technological systems through large-sized drawings and often coupling section and axonometry. In contrast to the aesthetics of aerial global flows, the section drawing is a cut that describes and reveals the extractive process: grounded and relational. Also, much like storytelling, drawing is always re-drawing– borrowing, misusing, appropriating. Our drawings are a series of clin d’oeil of aesthetic practices that think humanity’s relation with nature—be they Buckminster Fuller, Earth Art, or Malevich. The work also explores eclectically tones and modalities of narration—from John Hejduk to Jean-Luc Godard and Ursula Le Guin.

KOOZ How do you imagine Design Earth evolving in the coming years? What kind of projects are you seeking to engage with?

DE We propose to move the communication on climate change beyond the academia/activist divide and to engage larger audiences both within and beyond architecture. We just completed “Elephant in the Room,” which won the competition Reimaigning Museums for Climate Action, and that we developed from the two initial drawings into a six-minute animation, narrated by Donna Haraway. Eco-feminists remind us that the term engagement implies both a design to find out more about an issue and an ethical obligation to become concerned and to act. It is to such engagement that we have pledged so that mainstream media and institutional leaders treat the climate crisis like the existential emergency it is and take the ethical lead in responding to our collective climate emergency. The bigger the platform, the bigger the responsibility.

Bio

Design Earth is led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy. The practice engages the speculative architectural project as medium for making public the climate crisis. Their work includes commissions for Biennale Architettura (Main Exhibition, 2021; US Pavilion, 2018; Kuwait Pavilion, 2016), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2017), Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016); and shows at La Triennale Di Milano, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Matadero Madrid; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Times Museum, Guangzhou, and the New York Museum of Modern Art. Design Earth has been recognized by the NY Architectural League, Boghossian Foundation and Graham Foundation, amongst other honors. They are authors of Geographies of Trash (2015), Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2nd ed, 2020; 2018) and The Planet After Geoengineering (2021).