DESIGN EARTH

Geographies of Trash was awarded a 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award. The Award provides a venue for work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching by recognising and encouraging outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor. For the awards press release visit the ACSA website.

Geographies of Trash spatializes waste systems in Michigan to re-inscribe urban flows in design practices and public discourse. The project proposes five situated yet generic strategies of trash-formations in the American territorial grid. The five projects – Cap, Collect, Contain, Preserve, and Form –propose new imaginaries for landfilling, recycling, burning, re-using, and dumping. Such visions aspire to bring the valuation regimes of the urban into the domain of public controversies. By making trash visible, spatial, and formal, the project engages thus disciplinary and public debates on the city.

Geographies of Trash was funded by a University of Michigan Taubman College Research on the City. The project team includes Ben Hagenhoffer, Christina Kull, Hans Papke, Jonathan Puff, Aaron Weller. Luke Bulman (Thumb) is the graphic design consultant of the research publication.

For further information on the project, visit the Geographies of Trash research and exhibition pages.

Greetings from Gibraltar was exhibited at the University of Michigan North Quad October 1-18, 2013. The exhibition foregrounds the sea as a geographical unit that both separates and links lands on either side, as well as a space in its own right with programs such as fishing, swimming, travelling, shipping, and conquering.

The work was developed in the context of a 2013 University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Travel Studio to the Strait of Gibraltar.

4.7: A Geographic Stroll around the Horizon was awarded an honorable mention in the Rio de Janeiro CityVision international ideas competition. Under the theme of Sick and Wonder, the competition proposes to reflect about the future of urbanism unveiling the disgust behind our cities and subverting it through wonder. The International Jury comprised Alejandro Zaera-Polo along with Jeffrey Inaba, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, and Pedro Rivera. The design team includes Dorin Baul (M.Arch.'13), Justin Garrison (M.Arch.'12, M.U.D.'13), Carla Landa (M.Arch.'14), and Jia Weng (M.U.D.'13).

For more information visit the competition website.

Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy organized a session entitled Burn it. Bury it, Or send it on a Caribbean Cruise at the ACSA 101: New Constellations/ New Ecologies. The panel examines technologies of waste management at a geographic scale. It raises a provocation: if the abstraction of space conceals the political and ecological imperatives of waste, can the geographic as paradigm inscribe trash within design and public concerns? The papers examine the spaces of burial, mass burning, abandonment, and recycling of economic excess. By formalizing and materializing the relations of trash and space, the panel investigates how geographic imaginaries reclaim trash as “matter in place.”

For more information visit the conference website.

Rania Ghosn spoke at the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture on March 20 2013. The lecture is part of the Form and Energy Series, sponsored by BC Hydro Power Smart.

For further information on the UBC SALA Spring 2013 lecture series, visit the lectures schedule.

Rania Ghosn spoke at The City That Never Was: Urbanization after the Bubble. Organized by Christopher Marcinkoski and Javier Arpa, in cooperation with the Architectural League of New York, the symposium uses the economic and urban crisis in Spain as a lens through which to consider future patterns of urbanization and settlement.

For further information on, visit the symposium website.

Rania Ghosn presented some of her recent work on the Corn Belt at the Penn Design Architecture and Energy: The Influence of Climate and Region. Her presentation “Farming Fuel” proposed to explore the geographic as a means to explore alternative frameworks for architectural regionalism.

For further information on, visit the conference website.

Rania Ghosn’s “Where are the Missing Spaces?” is published in the Yale Architectural Journal Perspecta 45. The issue uses the concept of agency to investigate how architects can become agents for change within their own discipline and in the world at large.

Departing from the Common Interests advertising campaign of Total, the global oil and gas corporation, the essay argues that the erasure of geography is a “designed” misrepresentation that serves to externalize the costs of urban systems and conceal disagreements on how to organize the world and its resources. If the erasure of geography is an aesthetic-political project, could the reassertion of the geographic allow designer to intervene within power and it representations?

Perspecta 45 is edited by Kurt Evans, Iben Falconer and Ian Mills. Other contributions include essays by Michael Osman, Ines Weizman, Alfredo Brillembourg, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Jan Kempenaers, Pierluigi Serraino, Enrique Ramirez, and Keller Easterling.

For more information visit the publisher website.

Rania Ghosn spoke at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design "Landscapes of Energy: An Exploration of Physical Landscapes of Energy" May 3-4, 2012. The conference "Landscapes of Energy" brought together an international range of educators, researchers, writers, and practitioners in landscape architecture, architecture, archaeology and media arts involved in developing documentations practices in the contemporary landscape and its social, geological, ecological and infrastructural presence.

For further information visit the conference website.