DESIGN EARTH: The Planet After Geoengineering

DESIGN EARTH presents The Planet After Geoengineering at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Hashim Sarkis and titled How Will We Live Together?  

To celebrate the vernissage, the project animation will screen online for the opening weekend, from Thursday, May 20 through Sunday, May 23, 2021. Watch the film here.

In the midst of a climate crisis, DESIGN EARTH thinks with and against technologies that counteract the effects of anthropogenic climate change by deliberately intervening in Earth systems. The Planet After Geoengineering portrays Earth following the deployment of five such technologies in a series of speculative fictions—Petrified Carbon, Arctic Albedo, Sky River, Sulfur Storm, and Dust Cloud—all while situating such promisory visions within a genealogy of climate-control projects from 19th-century rainmaking machines and volcanic eruptions to Cold War military plans. 

The Planet After Geoengineering builds the worlds and tells the stories of geoengineering in three narrative media: drawing, animation, book. 

The 25 drawings are assembled into one planetary section from the deep underground into outer space. The installation is part of the As One Planet exhibition in the Giardini Central Pavilion.  

The animation (13:30 minutes) weaves together graphic and textual narratives with a music score by Christine Southworth & Evan Ziporyn. 

The book is a graphic novel in five chapters along with three critical framing essays by geographer Kathryn Yusoff, theorist Benjamin Bratton and climate intervention researcher Holly Jean Buck. The Planet After Geoengineering is published by Actar and with design assistance from Office of Luke Bulman. Learn more about the book here. 

DESIGN EARTH is led by Rania Ghosn (Lebanon, b. 1977) and El Hadi Jazairy (Algeria, b. 1970) and is based in Cambridge, MA and Ann Arbor, MI. The design research practice engages the speculative architectural project—as expounded through drawings, narratives, and artifacts—to make legible the systems, spaces, and scales that underpin the present technological landscape and to prompt debate on the climate crisis both within and beyond the discipline. Their recent book Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2nd. edition 2020; 2018), is a manifesto for the environmental imagination that renders sensible the issues of climate change and through geographic fiction 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. 

DESIGN EARTH Project Team 
Project leads: Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy
Design team: Reid Fellenbaum, Kelly Koh, Meng-Fu Kuo, Joude Mabsout, Jane Jia Weng; with contributions from Ayusha Ariana, Avery Nguyen, Michael Stradley
Animation team: Anhong Li, Monica Hutton

Project Sponsors:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Art, Science & Technology
University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

For press inquiries, please contact designearthoffice@gmail.com.