Climate Inheritance - Softcover

Ghosn, Rania; Jazairy, El Hadi; Earth, Design

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1638400997 ISBN 13: 9781638400998

Publisher: Actar, 2023

Synopsis

Climate Inheritance is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of world and heritage 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 failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis.  

In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, DESIGN EARTH casts ten World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks-rising sea levels, extinction, droughts, air pollution, melting glaciers, material vulnerability, unchecked tourism, and the massive displacement of communities and cultural artifacts-all while situating the present emergency within the wreckages of other ends of world, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism.  The possibilities of such climate inheritances are narrated in drawing triotvchs and mythologies that bequeath other worlds and values.

With Contributions of Lucia Allais, David Gissen, Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling

About this title

About the Authors

Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

El Hadi Jazairy is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan and Director of the Master of Urban Design degree program.

DESIGN EARTH is a research practice, founded by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy in 2010. Their work engages the medium of the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis. DESIGN EARTH are recipients of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Boghossian Foundation Prize, and ACSA Faculty Design Awards for outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor. The work of DESIGN EARTH has been featured internationally, including at Venice Architecture Biennale (2021; 2018; 2016), Victoria and Albert Museum (2022), Bauhaus Museum Dessau (2021), Milano Triennale (2019), Seoul Biennale (2017), Design Biennale Boston (2017) Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016); and in exhibitions at Onassis Stegi, SFMOMA, Matadero Madrid, ArkDes, MAAT, Guangzhou Times Museum, and Sursock Museum in Beirut, amongst others. Their project “After Oil” is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ghosn and Jazairy are authors of Geographies of Trash (2015), Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3nd ed. 2022), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), and Climate Inheritance (2023). They were founding editors of the Harvard GSD New Geographies journal and editors of issues Landscapes of Energy and Scales of the Earth.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The metonymic logic of preservation, as in Superstudio’s “Salvages of Italian Historic Centers” (1966) provided a compelling framework through which to think today of destruction, media, and value. Heritage sites belong to a collective imaginary. For the many people who have never been or will never go to Venice, photographs of a flooded city and the figures of submerged monuments embody or point to the threats of the climate crisis, offering some representational legibility of the unfathomable destruction of planetary systems. When Venice floods, the world reacts with calls to donate, and act. Put differently, the media persona of heritage sites can do work for the world. If we imagine a Russian doll figure that nests monument, city, and world, then a World Heritage site could, for the time of a story, stand for the world, which itself stands for all that is being destroyed by changes in the climate.

Edition details

• Publisher: Actar
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1638400997
• ISBN 13: 9781638400998
• Binding: Flexibound
• Number of pages: 152