DESIGN EARTH deploys the speculative project—drawing and narrative—to make public the climate crisis. The design research practice is directed by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy.
Their work has been featured internationally—including at Venice Biennale, Bauhaus Museum Dessau, SFMOMA, Milano Triennale, Sursock Museum in Beirut, Times Museum in Guangdong, Oslo Architecture Triennale and Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism—and is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. Ghosn and Jazairy are authors of Geographies of Trash (2015); Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3nd ed. 2022), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021) and Climate Inheritance (2023). DESIGN EARTH has been recognized with several awards, including United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Faculty Design Awards, and Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Awards.
Rania Ghosn (Beirut, b. 1977) is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
El Hadi Jazairy (Algeria, b. 1970) is Professor of Architecture and Director of Master of Urban Design degree program at the University of Michigan.
Brava!
The Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona (Natural Science Museum of Barcelona) is a prominent institution preserving over 130 years of natural history heritage, including more than three million specimens in mineralogy, petrology, paleontology, zoology, and botany. Since 2011, it mainly operates from the iconic Forum Building at Parc del Fòrum, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron. One of the museum’s most emblematic piece is a 20-meter-long skeleton of a whale beached at Cap de Ras, Llançà in Costa Brava in 1862. This iconic cetacean is now called “Brava” – which means “wild” in Catalan and Spanish. Since the 1950s, tourism has taken over from fishing as the principal economy of Costa Brava with a large number of hotels and sea resorts, and mainly for package holiday tourists from Europe.
DESIGN EARTH’s ongoing project is a series of fables that addresses the elephant in the room—the climate crisis—by animating charismatic figures from natural history museums. This design research identifies and leverages figures from the collections all while unsettling the museum apparatus—the devices, archives, histories, and audiences. The fragmentary remains of such creatures are animated, brought back to life, so to speak in rhyming verse, colorful imagery, and with some poignant humor. In Barcelona, this speculative fiction workshop will curate a media archive on the specimen, museum, city and region, with focus on the cultural prehistory, present, and speculative futures of the Mediterranean coast and of marine life.
