Architecture as Environmental Media: Rendering the Planetary

Architecture as Environmental Media: Rendering the Planetary (Edited by Daniel Jacobs, Routledge, 2025) is an edited volume exploring the relationship between climate change and representation in architectural production. As design disciplines confront the changing landscapes and consequences of climate breakdown, media for communicating socio-environmental relations play an increasingly critical role in defining new narratives for the future of our planet. To trouble the emergent conditions of the Anthropocene, designers must move between scales and across disciplines to develop new structures of knowledge and tools of representation: from the embodied to the technical, and the investigative to the projective. The voices gathered in this volume ask: what stakes are embedded in contemporary architectural environmental media, and how are designers reimagining this media landscape today? Chapters in the book explore counter-cartographies of migration and materials, forest ecologies and theories of abundance, hyperreal visualization and environmental simulation, architecture’s extractive and colonial systems, and pedagogies and practices for environmental futures. This book organizes these efforts into three threads of media practice: rendering visible, rendering sensible, and rendering actionable. These practices serve to reveal conditions made invisible by the dominant forces of global capitalism, engage alternative modes of sensing our environment, and foster new forms of action and agency against extractive systems. While these categories are inextricably intertwined, they represent distinct tactical approaches to media production, each exploring possible methods to develop new knowledge systems, shift aesthetic regimes, and transform collective politics.

Contributors: Debbie Chen, Danika Cooper, Nathalie Frankowski, Cruz Garcia, Dan Handel, Summer Islam of Material Cultures, Daniel Jacobs, Ali Ismail Karimi, Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee, Yves Moreau of Muoto, Galen Pardee, Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma, Michael Wang, and Leah Wulfman. Graphic design by Jisung Park.

Editor bio: Daniel Jacobs is an Instructional Assistant Professor at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston and co-founder of the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. His work examines the politics of environmental representation in architecture and the changing role of labor production in professional practice. He is a registered architect in Texas and New York.

Architecture as Environmental Media: Rendering the Planetary
ISBN 9781032787114 / 282 Pages 104 B/W Illustrations / December 2025 / Routledge

Symposium
Rendering the Planetary is a symposium that brings together book contributors from art, architecture, and landscape to discuss environmental media and visual culture in design today. Given the powerful role that visual media plays in constructing our understanding of nature and the environment, each contributor challenges us to reconsider how we participate in this aesthetic landscape. The symposium seeks to engage in a critical conversation about new experiments, theories, and agencies of environmental media in the context of anthropogenic climate breakdown: revealing, sensing, and working toward just transitions and alternative climate futures.

The event is part of the Field Notes lecture series and will take place on Monday, February 16, from 11am–1pm (CT) at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston. Presentations include:

Distorted Geometries: Toward Decolonial Cartographies of Sahara–Mediterranean Migration
Danika Cooper—Landscape architect and Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley

A Possible Bouquet 
Daniel Jacobs—Architect and co-founder of HOME-OFFICE, based in Houston

Architecture Between Seasons
Ali Ismail Karimi—Architect and co-founder of Civil Architecture, based in Bahrain

Eco Systems
Michael Wang—Artist based in New York City

Participant bios:
Danika Cooper is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where the core of her research and teaching centers on the geopolitics of global aridlands, finding alternatives to normative water ontologies, and designing resilient and just dry landscapes. Aridlands have largely been underexplored in landscape architecture—her work offers multiple ways of knowing, being, and engaging with desert landscapes to better inform current environmental and landscape architecture discourse and practice. 

Ali Ismail Karimi is an architect whose work explores public space, ecology, and the extractive landscapes of the Middle East. He is the co-founder of Civil Architecture, a practice based in Bahrain and Kuwait. Karimi previously worked with OFFICE KGDVS in Belgium and Alejandro Aravena/Elemental in Chile, and has served as a visiting critic at Rice University School of Architecture and the University of Bahrain. Karimi holds an M.Arch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Michael Wang is an artist based in New York. His practice uses systems that operate at both planetary and regional scales as media for art, addressing climate change, species distribution, resource allocation, and the global economy. Wang’s work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (2022), LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island, New York (curated by Swiss Institute, 2019), and the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2017). His work has also been included in Elevation 1049 in Gstaad (2023), the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021), Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018), and the XX Bienal de Arquitectura y Urbanismo in Valparaíso (2017). In 2017, he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant.