The World as an Architectural Project by Hashim Sarkis et al. (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: The World as an Architectural Project by Hashim Sarkis et al. Abby Spinak (bio) The World as an Architectural Project By Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio, with Gabriel Kozlowski. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Pp. 576. It is nice when the title of a book tells you precisely what it is about, and even better when the book's argument surprises you despite the title. The World as an Architectural Project asks, literally, how architects have viewed the planet as a site and reconceptualized globality through speculative design. By reframing "the world" as a design prompt, the authors de-construct it as a historically situated idea that has changed over time and been harnessed to different politics. They invite readers to "disentangle the conception of globes from the imposition of the global," a dichotomy they name mondialisation (following Jean-Luc Nancy, the ongoing project of world-forming) versus globalization (the hegemonic imposition of homogeneity) (pp. 9, 526). The book can therefore be read both as an archive of the changing relationship between the design professions and "the world," and as an activist call to designers for more pluralistic and less anthropocentric engagements with space. The authors begin by asking: "what does architecture do for the world? And, conversely, what does the world do for architecture?" (p. 7). In answer, they present a catalog of fifty visions from 1882 to 2019, drawing this periodization generally from Giovanni Arrighi's long twentieth century, and specifically from Spanish urban planner Arturo Soria y Mata's proposal of a "linear city" (la ciudad lineal) that would "fill the earth" (p. 21). The catalog goes beyond the usual suspects in the history of design (Geddes, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier) to include more theoretical and narrative explorations of the production of space—for example, the Urban [End Page 1250] Theory Lab's "planetary urbanization" and Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy's extractivism-focused Geostories (pp. 463, 492–3). The discussion intentionally slips between the literal-tangible and the conceptual-theoretical: for example, showing how the scale of "the world" has inspired new methodologies, as well as how collective imaginaries of globality have shifted. In this capacity, the authors define architecture as akin to "other artistic practices that use documentary procedures, analysis, and fiction in-distinctly to produce visions of social totalities" (p. 7). They invite readers to engage with these projects as situated texts, their world-forming aspirations as artifacts of the evolution and limits of the "architectural imagination" at different historical junctures (p. 527). Commendably, they observe that their catalog reflects "imbalances of class, race, and gender" that have unequally empowered men in the global North to imagine, design, and be heard at the scale of the world—inequalities that "are still pervasive in the profession of architecture" (p. 16). As itself an artifact of mondialisation, this book may be of interest to historians for its attention to architecture as an environmental act. The authors situate their catalog—briefly but incisively—as an intervention for the Anthropocene and conclude with a sense of urgency: "There is no time left and there is no other place to go" (pp. 4, 521). Given recent attention to the origins and periodization of the Anthropocene (and its many etymological alternatives), historians may find the book's optimism intriguing as a field-specific appropriation of Anthropocenic narrative. "Architects reject the closure of the future," Sarkis writes in the epilogue, and are therefore committed to "a necessity to heal the world starting from little architectural acts up" (pp. 522–3). The catalog can thus also be read as a politics of methodological experimentation with alternative "geo-visualizations" (pluralistic, non-anthropocentric). In this framing, the book intersects with other recent calls to reimagine architecture as a field in the face of climate change—including Elisa Iturbe's critiques of "carbon form" as a violent spatial logic that is sufficiently entrenched to endure beyond decarbonization; Charlotte Malterre-Barthes's "A Global Moratorium on New Construction" initiative, which calls for a reorientation of architecture towards reuse and redistribution; and Damian White's critical material design politics for a democratic Anthropocene—all of whom ask what the tacit assumptions of mainstream...