Architecture as Environmental Media: Rendering the Planetary

This edited volume explores the agency of environmental media 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 confront the Anthropocene, designers must increasingly move between scales and across disciplines to develop new structures of knowledge and tools of representation: from the embodied to the technical, the investigative to the projective. Ultimately, this volume asks: What stakes are embedded in contemporary architectural environmental media, and how are designers re-imagining 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. 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.

Exploring architecture and design through the lenses of media theory, environmental studies, visual studies, geography, and landscape, this book will engage students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines.

Daniel Jacobs is 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 architecture. Jacobs is a registered architect in Texas and New York.