Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (review)

Geostories is an array of imaginative stories about the Earth as the broadest system that encompasses the environmental, political, and technological complexities on our planet. As the fascinating title implies, Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy invite readers to appreciate the stories of the vast scale of time and space through the medium of architectural projects that are abstract, speculative, and powerful. Ghosn and Jazairy are architects and educators. Ghosn is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT School of Architecture + Planning, and Jazairy is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. They co-founded the Design Earth architectural practice in 2010.

The book has three main sections—“Terrarium,” “Aquarium,” and “Planetarium.” Each section includes four or five stories, starting with a short narrative followed by a series of architectural monochrome drawings constituting fictional science grounded on historical truth and geographical references. The first section, “Terrarium,” includes five projects that tell stories of the land suffering from carbon emissions, oil extraction, deforestation, and trash. A technological future of cities and infrastructure is painted with environmental imagination and geographic representation through projective designs and dystopic fantasy. For example, “Georama of Trash” and “Trash Peaks” present an apocalyptic vision for a waste management system. This story seems to be the extended account of Design Earth’s previous book, Geographies of Trash (Ghosn and Jazairy 2016).

The second section, “Aquarium,” includes four stories of water on a planetary scale. This section focuses on sea level rise, water scarcity, water dispute, ocean acidification, seabed pollution, deep-sea mining, and marine plastic waste. In particular, it presents a speculative future requiring planetary imagination and a cosmopolitical contract. Desalination, glacier towing, iceberg dams, cyborg fish, and other mechanical solutions are offered as productive ways to live in this system.

The final section, “Planetarium,” presents five stories on planetary space. An imagined atmosphere such as air cities and fresh air capsules illustrate human life in an airpocalypse era. Outer space is assumed to be a common territory that collectively belongs to humankind, where humans experiment with cleaning space debris, comet exploration, sky mining, and a planetary ark for the sixth extinction. Similar conceptual themes and approaches are addressed in several recent publications (Yaneva and Zaera-Polo 2017; Nesbit and Trangoš 2020). For instance, New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial, the most recent edition of Harvard GSD’s New Geographies journal series, extends the exploration of the historical and contemporary consequences of our planetary relationship with space through a series of written, photographic, and representational investigations.

The book adds another section, “Assemblies,” that includes full-page color photographs of selected projects from actual exhibits (178–200), which helps readers connect to the geostories in the three main segments. At the end, there are three reviews on Design Earth’s work from architectural professionals in Boston, New York, and England with extensive professional, academic, administrative, or writing experiences.

The book’s strength is in the wealth of drawings that infer the dawning threats to the Earth and cosmopolitical designs as a response. The pictorial and textual expressions are witty yet provocative and creative but poignant. Drawings are not simple infographics or data visualization, but are visual collectivity combining architectural plans and perspectives of the Earth in various dimensions and unfamiliar scales. Readers may feel uncomfortable looking at the drawings at first if they are only familiar with traditional means of visual communication, such as colorful illustrations, realistic photos, and bird’s-eye views. The drawings train the eyes to look forward, prompting readers to pause and ponder the future of our threatened planet, humanity, and civilization.

Geostories is in line with other architectural works that use a critical approach and are open to engaging environmental challenges within its realm. Anker, Harpman, and Mitchell’s Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (2014), for example, has parallels with this book in that they place human rational, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns. A commonality highlighted in these books, along with the...