CRUNCH: Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment

How might the architectural imagination help make sense of the Earth during the climate crisis? In this lecture, Rania Ghosn uses speculative design to raise public awareness about the climate crisis. The architectural project becomes a medium to synthesise spatial knowledge across scales and to speculate on how to live with many forms of environmental challenges, including oil extraction, deep-sea mining, space debris and other social-ecological issues. 

This event is part of the flagship CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. 

Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. Doors close at 18:40. 

Speaker biographies

Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding director, with El Hadi Jazairy, of DESIGN EARTH. Their design research practice employs the speculative project as a medium to make public the climate crisis by charting how urban technological systems have transformed the earth and imagining ways of living with such legacy geographies on a damaged planet. The work of DESIGN EARTH has been published and exhibited internationally – recently at Venice Biennale, Bauhaus Museum Dessau and SFMOMA, amongst others – and is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. Ghosn is the author of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), Geographies of Trash (2015), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021) and Climate Inheritance (2023), as well as the editor of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (2010) and a themed issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, titled “Worlding. Energy. Transitions” (2024). Rania is recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Graham Foundation grants and ACSA Faculty Design Awards for outstanding work in environmental design fields as a critical endeavour. 

Amy Catania Kulper is an architect, theorist and curator whose teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory and criticism with design. In September 2022, she joined The Bartlett School of Architecture as Professor of Architecture and Director of the School. Previously, she was Department Head at RISD (the Rhode Island School of Design) where she was actively engaged in the project of making architectural pedagogy and practice more accessible, inclusive and equitable. Amy’s writings are published in Log, The Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Candide, the Journal of Architectural Education and numerous edited volumes. Amy has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education where she has acted as the Design Editor for six years, receiving the ACSA Distinguished Service Award for her work on the journal. 

More information

Image: DESIGN EARTH, Cosmograph (Render), 2024.