The AAG Review of Books

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Geostories: Another Architecture for the

Environment

Joshua Comaroff

To cite this article: Joshua Comaroff (2020) Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment,
The AAG Review of Books, 8:2, 68-70, DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2020.1722459

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2020.1722459

Published online: 09 Apr 2020.

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The AAG Review OF BOOKS
Geostories:
Another Architecture for
the Environment
Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy.
New York, NY: Actar, 2018.
$29.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-
945150-79-1).
Reviewed by Joshua Comaroff,
Department of Social Sciences
(Geography), Yale-NUS College,
Singapore.
The science of environmental crisis is
not an easy subject to visualize. An-
thropogenic effects on the world’s cli-
mate have a problematic visuality, and
this is part of the difficulty encountered
by those attempting to demonstrate
what the factors are that drive global
warming. Many players in this narrative are invisible: aero-
sols and currents, albedo variations, radiation, and mic-
roparticulates. Glacial melt makes for a good evidentiary
exhibit, but the processes that cause this continue to hide
in plain sight, and thus remain vulnerable to denial by cli-
mate “skeptics.”
Scale is also a factor. Not only is the materiality of climate
change often invisible—or microscopic—its effects are dis-
continuous, and its processes span distances that exceed
the photographic. This is exactly the issue faced by meteo-
rologists, who have traditionally struggled to make pressure
fronts and intercontinental flows subject to cartographic
conventions. Some remain so; for example, the Hadley
Cell, which raises equatorial air and lowers it around the
30th Parallel. This circulation is so large as to link distant
cities such as Singapore and Chongqing.
Such phenomena typically exceed the scale of the emo-
tive, also. A drawing of thermohaline circulation, for ex-
ample, lacks the declarative force of a starving polar bear.
This becomes yet more difficult with phenomena that are
extended in time—sometimes gradual, or asynchronous.
The AAG Review of Books 8(2) 2020, pp. 68–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2020.1722459.
©2020 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
Climate change is too slow to be cin-
ematic; it is not an event, but a pro-
cess. This gives it a radically different
temporal character, one that requires
patience and sustained attention. This
also makes it vulnerable to denial—as
in the Fox News pundits who confuse
climate with weather, gloating over the
supposed “evidence” of unseasonably
cold temperatures.
This is not only a question of imagery,
however. There is also a scarcity of il-
luminating writing about climate emer-
gency. Many books on “the Anthropo-
cene,” in fact, merely underscore the
urgency of rising temperatures or ocean
levels and reemphasize human culpabil-
ity. This is possibly due to the ongoing
scandal of the U.S. right’s unwillingness to recognize the
problem at all. Little has come from Europe, either, where
consensus sides more firmly with the preponderance of
environmental evidence. At its best, like that of environ-
mental journalist Gaia Vince, this literature is helpful in
demonstrating the diversity of effects across widely sepa-
rate locales; that is, making visible the causal linkages that
are the proper “substance” of climate change. This is less
a global account, than a series of local ones, however. The
planetary nature of the phenomenon somehow still lacks
a vital accounting. At the same moment, in theoretical
circles, a wave of new “ontological” and Latourian prop-
ositions have, perhaps unhelpfully, attempted to displace
the centrality of human agency at the moment when man-
kind’s action might matter most.
This is where Geostories, a new collection of speculative
architectural works by DESIGN EARTH (an architectural
practice founded in 2010 by MIT architecture faculty Ra-
nia Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy), suggests an alternative di-
rection. It is a monograph of projects that do not fit any
traditional category of design: These are not “buildings”
detailed for functional human inhabitation, and the au-
thors seem largely unconcerned with the aesthetic elabora-
tion of objects. Instead, Geostories is a collection of provo-
cations that attempt to understand the idea of design at
the scale of the planet, and beyond—and the terror and
promise of human ingenuity.
The projects themselves are series of tableaux—axono-
metric projections, perspective views, plans, and compos-
ite drawings. These are primarily in black and white, with
dense hatchings of lines that makes them resemble Victo-
rian engravings as much as technical diagrams. Most por-
tray stages of geotechnical operations, vast relocations of
waste, infrastructures, and populations. Some projects deal
explicitly with the aim to “make visible” the externalities
of capitalism and consumption, whereas others dramatize
the uneven crisis landscapes of the anthropogenic. In the
chapter “Apart, We Are Together,” for example, the au-
thors depict the uneven, class-dependent distribution of
drought in California. The solution, in this case, is a “mas-
sive cruciform landform” to reforest, retain moisture, and
seed clouds. It is both an overt symbol of redemption and
a redistributive technology in aid of the Golden State’s cli-
mate refugees.
The projects of Geostories—organized into the categories
Terrarium, Aquarium, and Planetarium—are intended
to operate across (and on) scale in a way that cannot be
achieved via conventional forms of academic inquiry. This
is clear in the format of the study itself, which proceeds
from landscape to cosmos. This is clearest in the chap-
ter titled “Cosmorama.” Here, three projects channel the
speculative utopias of space travel, or of colonization of
other planets, as another redemptive possibility for man-
kind. This gestures clearly to Buckminster Fuller’s notion
of “Spaceship Earth,” in which mankind is imagined as pi-
lots of a massive orbital vehicle. Less obvious are references
to deep-space probes, and to the Voyager record—sent into
the remote galaxy in 1977 as an outreach to other forms of
intelligent life.
Another diorama, “Planetary Ark,” imagines the 2024 re-
purposing of the International Space Station (ISS) as a pre-
serve of animals that have been sent into orbit for research
during the course of the U.S. and Soviet space programs.
These sacrificial creatures, with those at immediate risk of
extinction by human influence, are sent from earth in an
“architekton.” This is an appropriation of the Empire State
Building, which launches toward the ISS as the phallic ref-
ugee boat of our human Imperium. In space, the preserved
species spend thousands of years in cohabitation, so that
their hybridized descendants might return to recolonize
earth.
SPRING 2020
In its clever manipulation of technical drawing conven-
tions, the stories of Geostories begin to suggest, as the au-
thors intended, new ways to speak about the earth as a co-
lossal stage of interconnected crisis events. As a form of
mythical narrative image, for example, the drawings col-
lapse multiple scales within a single frame of reference. The
Ark is portrayed via a series of cutaway perspectives, which
superimpose the scale of the heroic animal to that of ar-
chitecture, and again to the constellations. There is a clear
reference to the traditions of colonial natural drawing, in
which an almost absurd imaginary of diversity (represented
by a cloud of giraffes, birds, primates, and tropical animals)
are channeled toward the refuge of the New York tower. By
playing on this representational trope, the authors are—
with clear allegorical intent—linking colonial notions of
a limitless nature, from the Victorian to the American, to
the aspirations of the aerospace era.
This is an operation that cannot be performed through the
traditional tools of geography—or in any realist mode of
description. In analytical writing or in areal study, for ex-
ample, information is conventionally presented within the
confines of one scale or subject, before the frame of refer-
ence is shifted to another. The format of multiple archi-
tectural views within a drawing—what in the Beaux Arts
tradition was called analytique—is not confined in such a
manner. Certain drawings, such as the cross-section, might
mathematically distort the size of micro- and macroscopic
elements to make them visually perceptible at the same
scale. The analytique also allows for multiple projections to
be juxtaposed (e.g., perspectives and plans), allowing for an
alternative understanding of metrical facts and narrative
relationships.
These drawings raise another epochal question raised by
Ghosn and Jazairy’s book: What is the role of the architect
in the climate emergency? This is a central implication of
the projects in Geostories—in their dual roles as provoca-
tions and examples of professional practice.
Overwhelmingly, the contribution of the design professions
in the climate emergency has been the promotion of the
“sustainable building”—a fiction in which new, marginally
less wasteful structures will help to allay the contribution
of construction to carbon-led warming, material depletion,
and other environmental effects. Although this might mar-
ginally slow the pace of violence against the earth, it is in
no sense a viable long-term solution; rather, it is a way to
justify continued building despite obviously harmful con-
sequences. Through the successful endorsement of green
building as a benevolent practice, architects have become
leaders of greenwashing; that is, selling the notion that
69
ecological problems can be addressed through acts of ethi-
cal consumption.
Geostories emphatically suggests an alternative approach—
that architecture might be the discipline best equipped to
speak about (and visualize) climate change. The book’s
drawings remind us that the architect is, in a fundamental
sense, the artist of putting things in a common space. If
literature is the field of narrative, then architecture is the
home of the “correlative”: the arrangement or placement
of objects together, and the argument for their relatedness.
The building design process is, first and foremost, the posi-
tioning of objects, functions, materials, and atmospheres—
what design professionals call the “brief”—within a given
envelope. Correlation, in the hands of the architect, deter-
mines the appropriate closeness of, for example, work and
sleep, or eating and defecating. It arbitrates the privacy of
conversations happening within a shared perimeter, or the
realms of property and usership of an object-world.
At the same time, the architectural drawing as demon-
strated in Geostories remains perhaps the best medium for
describing the relations among vectors of place or process
70
that exist beyond the scalar or temporal range of a photo-
graph or film clip. These bring aspects of a global or galactic
scale into a meaningful proximity by manipulating section
or perspective, or by introducing orthographic techniques
such as the so-called break line—a notation that removes
a band of inconsequential space to bring important objects
or locations into artificial adjacency. Unlike a photograph,
DESIGN EARTH’s technical drawing methods allow for
the revelation of objects that are hidden: too small to see
or eclipsed behind others.
The correlative—the simple placement of objects or effects
in a common space—is a form of description that is in-
creasingly required by our historical moment, in which key
processes are related via vast and invisible causal chains,
acting over months and years. At present, this is not just a
descriptive, but also a political act, exposing the networks
of power and externality that typically escape any eviden-
tiary medium. In its play of the technical and the poetic,
the speculative and the admonitory, Geostories suggests a
way past the stalemate of alarm and culpability that char-
acterizes the literature of the Anthropocene, an opening
into architectures of rehabilitation and hope.
THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS