Jazairy’s Design Earth Projects Featured in Exhibition in Singapore

How can we use architecture to explain a world in the midst of climate change? Taubman College’s El Hadi Jazairy has set out to answer this question through a new exhibition curated by the Center of Contemporary Arts and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in collaboration with Rania Ghosn.

Design Earth: Speculative Fiction for the Climate features projects by DESIGN EARTH, a research practice founded and directed by Jazairy, associate professor of architecture and director of the master of urban design program, and Ghosn, associate professor of architecture and urbanism at MIT. The exhibition is inspired by drawings in two books published by DESIGN EARTH: Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (Actar Publishers, 2018); and The Planet After Geoengineering (Actar Publishers, 2021). 

DESIGN EARTH uses speculative architecture to raise awareness about climate change. Jazairy and Ghosn’s work has been published in Architectural Review and New Geographies, and their exhibits have been featured at architecture festivals and museums in Venice, Italy, Oslo, Norway, and Seoul, South Korea. The four projects chosen for the exhibition include 52 drawings and were first featured in Geostories and The Planet After Geoengineering: “After Oil,” “Pacific Aquarium,” “Cosmorama,” and “The Planet After Geoengineering.”

Featured in Geostories, “After Oil,” “Pacific Aquarium,” and “Cosmorama” represent a manifesto for imagining architectural projects in the atmosphere, deep seabed, and outer space. By examining the impacts of extractive technologies, these exhibits describe the political and ethical implications of our actions on the environment.

The Planet after Geoengineering is a graphic novel which examines the controversies around climate modification technologies that intervene in Earth’s natural systems as a form of planetary management. Split into five stories — Petrified Carbon, Arctic Albedo, Sky River, Sulfur Storm, and Dust Cloud — this exhibit will depict possible futures for an Earth impacted by geoengineering.

The full exhibition will be open to the public from April 28th through June 13th, and then open by appointment from June 14th to August 15th.