Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy. New York, NY: Actar, 2018. $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-945150-79-1).
The science of environmental crisis is not an easy subject to visualize. Anthropogenic effects on the world's climate have a problematic visuality, and this is part of the difficulty encountered by those attempting to demonstrate what the factors are that drive global warming. Many players in this narrative are invisible: aerosols and currents, albedo variations, radiation, and microparticulates. Glacial melt makes for a good evidentiary exhibit, but the processes that cause this continue to hide in plain sight, and thus remain vulnerable to denial by climate “skeptics.”
Scale is also a factor. Not only is the materiality of climate change often invisible—or microscopic—its effects are discontinuous, and its processes span distances that exceed the photographic. This is exactly the issue faced by meteorologists, who have traditionally struggled to make pressure fronts and intercontinental flows subject to cartographic conventions. Some remain so; for example, the Hadley Cell, which raises equatorial air and lowers it around the 30th Parallel. This circulation is so large as to link distant cities such as Singapore and Chongqing.
Such phenomena typically exceed the scale of the emotive, also. A drawing of thermohaline circulation, for example, lacks the declarative force of a starving polar bear. This becomes yet more difficult with phenomena that are extended in time—sometimes gradual, or asynchronous. Climate change is too slow to be cinematic; it is not an event, but a process. This gives it a radically different temporal character, one that requires patience and sustained attention. This also makes it vulnerable to denial—as in the Fox News pundits who confuse climate with weather, gloating over the supposed “evidence” of unseasonably cold temperatures.
This is not only a question of imagery, however. There is also a scarcity of illuminating writing about climate emergency. Many books on “the Anthropocene,” in fact, merely underscore the urgency of rising temperatures or ocean levels and reemphasize human culpability. This is possibly due to the ongoing scandal of the U.S. right's unwillingness to recognize the problem at all. Little has come from Europe, either, where consensus sides more firmly with the preponderance of environmental evidence. At its best, like that of environmental journalist Gaia Vince, this literature is helpful in demonstrating the diversity of effects across widely separate locales; that is, making visible the causal linkages that are the proper “substance” of climate change. This is less a global account, than a series of local ones, however. The planetary nature of the phenomenon somehow still lacks a vital accounting. At the same moment, in theoretical circles, a wave of new “ontological” and Latourian propositions have, perhaps unhelpfully, attempted to displace the centrality of human agency at the moment when mankind's action might matter most.
This is where Geostories, a new collection of speculative architectural works by DESIGN EARTH (an architectural practice founded in 2010 by MIT architecture faculty Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy), suggests an alternative direction. It is a monograph of projects that do not fit any traditional category of design: These are not “buildings” detailed for functional human inhabitation, and the authors seem largely unconcerned with the aesthetic elaboration of objects. Instead, Geostories is a collection of provocations that attempt to understand the idea of design at the scale of the planet, and beyond—and the terror and promise of human ingenuity.
The projects themselves are series of tableaux—axonometric projections, perspective views, plans, and composite drawings. These are primarily in black and white, with dense hatchings of lines that makes them resemble Victorian engravings as much as technical diagrams. Most portray stages of geotechnical operations, vast relocations of waste, infrastructures, and populations. Some projects deal explicitly with the aim to “make visible” the externalities of capitalism and consumption, whereas others dramatize the uneven crisis landscapes of the anthropogenic. In the chapter “Apart, We Are Together,” for example, the authors depict the uneven, class-dependent distribution of drought in California. The solution, in this case, is a “massive cruciform landform” to reforest, retain moisture, and seed clouds. It is both an overt symbol of redemption and a redistributive technology in aid of the Golden State's climate refugees.
The projects of Geostories—organized into the categories Terrarium, Aquarium, and Planetarium—are intended to operate across (and on) scale in a way that cannot be achieved via conventional forms of academic inquiry. This is clear in the format of the study itself, which proceeds from landscape to cosmos. This is clearest in the chapter titled “Cosmorama.” Here, three projects channel the speculative utopias of space travel, or of colonization of other planets, as another redemptive possibility for mankind. This gestures clearly to Buckminster Fuller's notion of “Spaceship Earth,” in which mankind is imagined as pilots of a massive orbital vehicle. Less obvious are references to deep-space probes, and to the Voyager record—sent into the remote galaxy in 1977 as an outreach to other forms of intelligent life.
Another diorama, “Planetary Ark,” imagines the 2024 repurposing of the International Space Station (ISS) as a preserve of animals that have been sent into orbit for research during the course of the U.S. and Soviet space programs. These sacrificial creatures, with those at immediate risk of extinction by human influence, are sent from earth in an “architekton.” This is an appropriation of the Empire State Building, which launches toward the ISS as the phallic refugee boat of our human Imperium. In space, the preserved species spend thousands of years in cohabitation, so that their hybridized descendants might return to recolonize earth.
In its clever manipulation of technical drawing conventions, the stories of Geostories begin to suggest, as the authors intended, new ways to speak about the earth as a colossal stage of interconnected crisis events. As a form of mythical narrative image, for example, the drawings collapse multiple scales within a single frame of reference. The Ark is portrayed via a series of cutaway perspectives, which superimpose the scale of the heroic animal to that of architecture, and again to the constellations. There is a clear reference to the traditions of colonial natural drawing, in which an almost absurd imaginary of diversity (represented by a cloud of giraffes, birds, primates, and tropical animals) are channeled toward the refuge of the New York tower. By playing on this representational trope, the authors are—with clear allegorical intent—linking colonial notions of a limitless nature, from the Victorian to the American, to the aspirations of the aerospace era.
This is an operation that cannot be performed through the traditional tools of geography—or in any realist mode of description. In analytical writing or in areal study, for example, information is conventionally presented within the confines of one scale or subject, before the frame of reference is shifted to another. The format of multiple architectural views within a drawing—what in the Beaux Arts tradition was called analytique—is not confined in such a manner. Certain drawings, such as the cross-section, might mathematically distort the size of micro- and macroscopic elements to make them visually perceptible at the same scale. The analytique also allows for multiple projections to be juxtaposed (e.g., perspectives and plans), allowing for an alternative understanding of metrical facts and narrative relationships.
These drawings raise another epochal question raised by Ghosn and Jazairy's book: What is the role of the architect in the climate emergency? This is a central implication of the projects in Geostories—in their dual roles as provocations and examples of professional practice.
Overwhelmingly, the contribution of the design professions in the climate emergency has been the promotion of the “sustainable building”—a fiction in which new, marginally less wasteful structures will help to allay the contribution of construction to carbon-led warming, material depletion, and other environmental effects. Although this might marginally slow the pace of violence against the earth, it is in no sense a viable long-term solution; rather, it is a way to justify continued building despite obviously harmful consequences. Through the successful endorsement of green building as a benevolent practice, architects have become leaders of greenwashing; that is, selling the notion that ecological problems can be addressed through acts of ethical consumption.
Geostories emphatically suggests an alternative approach—that architecture might be the discipline best equipped to speak about (and visualize) climate change. The book's drawings remind us that the architect is, in a fundamental sense, the artist of putting things in a common space. If literature is the field of narrative, then architecture is the home of the “correlative”: the arrangement or placement of objects together, and the argument for their relatedness. The building design process is, first and foremost, the positioning of objects, functions, materials, and atmospheres—what design professionals call the “brief”—within a given envelope. Correlation, in the hands of the architect, determines the appropriate closeness of, for example, work and sleep, or eating and defecating. It arbitrates the privacy of conversations happening within a shared perimeter, or the realms of property and usership of an object-world.
At the same time, the architectural drawing as demonstrated in Geostories remains perhaps the best medium for describing the relations among vectors of place or process that exist beyond the scalar or temporal range of a photograph or film clip. These bring aspects of a global or galactic scale into a meaningful proximity by manipulating section or perspective, or by introducing orthographic techniques such as the so-called break line—a notation that removes a band of inconsequential space to bring important objects or locations into artificial adjacency. Unlike a photograph, DESIGN EARTH's technical drawing methods allow for the revelation of objects that are hidden: too small to see or eclipsed behind others.
The correlative—the simple placement of objects or effects in a common space—is a form of description that is increasingly required by our historical moment, in which key processes are related via vast and invisible causal chains, acting over months and years. At present, this is not just a descriptive, but also a political act, exposing the networks of power and externality that typically escape any evidentiary medium. In its play of the technical and the poetic, the speculative and the admonitory, Geostories suggests a way past the stalemate of alarm and culpability that characterizes the literature of the Anthropocene, an opening into architectures of rehabilitation and hope.