Jazairy’s “Pacific Aquarium” on exhibit at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale

Assistant Professor El Hadi Jazairy’s “Pacific Aquarium” is on view at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale which opened on September 8, 2016. Jazairy and his Design Earth partner, Rania Ghosn, have designed and built nine aquariums to allow visitors to directly experience the scale of overlapping concerns of ecology and economy in the Pacific Ocean. The work highlights the projected 1 million square meters of deep-sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, considered the earth’s largest continuous ecological unit and perhaps constitutes the greatest footprint of human activity. The project appropriates a familiar object, the aquarium, to take aim at the distance between humanity’s economic worries and the great scales of the earth. Each aquarium constructs a section of the world in which resource exploitation and climate change are woven into spatial scales, temporalities, and species beyond the human. Collectively, the nine aquariums connect political ecology with speculative design.

The Oslo (Norway) Architecture Triennale (OAT) is the Nordic region’s biggest architecture festival and one of the world’s important arenas for dissemination and discussion of architectural and urban challenges. This year’s OAT, “After Belonging: A Triennale In Residence, On Residence and the Ways We Stay In Transit” is the sixth installment of this global event and runs September 8-November 27, 2016

For more information about Pacific Aquarium: http://design-earth.org/projects/pacific-aquarium/
Featured on Metropolis: http://www.metropolismag.com/September-2016/Finding-Your-Place/
More about the Oslo Architecture Triennale: http://oslotriennale.no/en/.