Climate Inheritance book launch

Please join us at the Marinaressa Gardens on Saturday, May 20, 2–3:30pm for a conversation with DESIGN EARTH, Irene Sunwoo, and Brendan Cormier in celebration of Climate Inheritance (2023), out now—and on sale through Actar Publishers. The event is hosted by the European Cultural Centre in conjunction with the 2023 Biennale Architettura.

Climate Inheritance is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of “heritage” and “world” in the Anthropocene. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites—from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands—have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, DESIGN EARTH casts World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckages of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism. The harms and possibilities of such inheritances are narrated in drawing triptychs and mythologies to bequeath other worlds and values that are urgent and necessary. The book includes three framing essays by Lucia Allais, David Gissen, and Colin Sterling and Rodney Harrison. 

Climate Inheritance
DESIGN EARTH Team: Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, Anhong Li, and Emma Jurczynski, with initial contributions from Marco Nieto and Zhifei Xu.
Graphic design: Office of Luke Bulman
Sponsor: MIT Center for Art Science and Technology (CAST) Mellon Faculty Grant.

DESIGN EARTH, founded by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, is an architectural research practice that deploys the speculative project to make public the climate crisis. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including recently at Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (2023), Bauhaus Museum Dessau (2021), and Venice Architecture Biennale (Giardini, Central Pavilion in 2021; US Pavilion in 2018; Kuwait Pavilion in 2016). Ghosn and Jazairy are authors of Geographies of Trash (2015); Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3nd ed. 2022 [2018]), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), and Climate Inheritance (2023). They are recipients of the United States Artist Fellowship and the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, amongst other honors. Ghosn (Lebanon, b. 1977) is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jazairy (Algeria, b. 1970) is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master of Urban Design degree program at the University of Michigan. 

Irene Sunwoo is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator, Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was previously Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and Director of Exhibitions at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Brendan Cormier is a Canadian writer, curator, and urban designer based in London. He is currently Chief Curator at the V&A East. In 2016, he curated A World of Fragile Parts at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.