128 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) to Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), a novel that in many ways describes a similar spatial typology; the towers of Manhattan become the substructure for a new accreting urbanism in that novel’s adaptation to a dramatic increase in sea-level. Salvage and (re)construction in Robinson’s New York are not driven by a libertarian individualist impulse, but are enabled by shared vulnerability and consensus politics, and tempered by participatory and democratic processes across all scales of government, from the individual building to the nation. While Dobraszczyk does recognize the shared space of the urban imaginary as it is developed in the conversation between diverse imaginary practices, and how such a conversation unfolds greater possibilities for real-world practice, his discussion of this range of possibilities does not adequately describe how sf might be understood as a provocation to architectural practice. As a provocation, sf would not necessarily produce new technologies or a repertoire of new spatial, formal, or material types, but instead would offer a critical point of view to reflect on contemporary practices and would describe how the futures that architects imagine now will affect the lives of those inside, including their social, political, or cultural belonging. Instead, Dobraszczyk offers a spectacle of the new city in a collage of images culled from diverse media. As an architect, I can understand the appeal of the spatial and formal innovation available to an unfettered imagination. While it does offer a framework for investigating futurity, the suggestion that newness is the only or even primary concern of either sf or architecture does a disservice to those who would learn from or practice either.—Joel Letkemann, Aarhus School of Architecture Redesigning the Earth. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy. Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment. New York: Actar, 2018. 232 pp. $29.95 pbk. The collaborative architectural group Design Earth, made up of Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, was founded in 2010. Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment is the culmination of a number of projects produced by Design Earth and exhibited widely from 2013 to 2018, including as part of a group exhibition representing the US Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Actar Publishers, based in Barcelona and New York, focuses on, according to their website, “the culture of the architectural, urbanism and landscape disciplines through innovative design, theory, criticism and pedagogy.” Alongside their creative practice, the collaborators are both academics: Ghosn is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT, while Jazairy is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. Both are graduates of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s doctoral program and founding editors of the journal New Geographies, also published by Actar, as was their previous book Geographies of Trash (2015). Design Earth contributed a series of images, “Of Oil and Ice,” to SFS’s special issue on the climate crisis (45.3, Nov. 2018). According to a 2016 interview with Ghosn and Jazairy on the architectural blog Archinet, with contributing writer Nicholas Kodory, the projects in 129 BOOKS IN REVIEW Geostories come out of the work they started at the journal, bringing together the geographical (at the scale of the global) and the architectural to overcome, as they write in the book’s introduction, today’s “poverty of geographic imagination, both spatially and visually” (11). The book aims to help us visualize the vast and unknowable events transforming the planet, from climate change to deep-sea mining to space debris, through the language of architectural drawing. But rather than representing visual evidence of these transformations, Design Earth proposes that storytelling, in the form of sf and fantasy, offers the best techniques for “nurturing new habits of seeing, and, ultimately, for projecting alternative forms of organizing life” (13). As a result, Geostories includes not only art works in the form of architectural drawings but also an introductory essay by the collaborators and three essay responses by academics in the field of architectural practice, history, and theory. Deeply influenced by the writings of Bruno Latour, Geostories builds on the philosopher’s call to develop a tradition of political arts, uniting political...
Read full abstract
Oct 4, 2024
Carlotta Darò + 4
Open Access
