The architectural drawing makes visible
absent things, synthesises sciences and scales
linked to brief organic lifetimes and the
immensity of geologic time, and weaves the
totality into a complex and relational fabulation.
A drawing is an argument about the world; it
is at once descriptive, synthetic, critical
and always speculative. Drawings argue
through the techniques they use and points of
view they choose. The section, for instance,
counteracts the abstract Earth of aerial
mappings, diagrammatic flows and soft
perspectives.
Its orthographic projection plane produces
the vertical territory. In natural history, such a
split-level view (also known as an aquarium
view) shows domains both above and below
the surface of the water or ground.
As such, the section drawing provides an
opportunity to reimagine the relations
of geological and architectural forces at a
planetary scale.
In a series of projects that speculate on
environmental modulation as they appear on
earth, sea and sky, Geostories is both an
aesthetic practice and a political project,
referring both to the design of common worlds
and the political debates around what
constitutes them and for whom they are built.
The projects in the book counter the stories of
industrial capitalism with an even more
fantastic narrative machine that tells truth to
realism. They ascribe agency where it is hard to
assign causality. Inhabited and contested,
they open up our imagination of technology
and the environment to relentless diversity
and urgent troubles. These stories are retold
and re-envisioned to pose a vast common
ground on which we can meet, as responsible
citizens of the Earth, rationally, aesthetically
and emotionally. For much like storytelling,
drawing is always re-drawing – borrowing,
misusing, appropriating.
They matter for our disciplinary and
political futures, as educators, designers and
citizens. The importance of such a wonder-
charged ecological project should not be
overlooked when conceiving planetary
relationships anew. After all, environmentalism
is foremost a protest on behalf of values,
an engagement with the world beyond the
tunnel vision of “resourcism”. And it is tempting
to think that such attention to wonder can
make us care.
Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazair, architects, are
the founders of Design Earth. Their work has
been exhibited and published widely, at the
Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seoul Biennale,
the Design Biennial Boston, Oslo Architecture
Triennale, the Times Museum (Guangzhou) and
the Sursock Museum (Beirut), among others.