Event Information

El Hadi Jazairy is Associate Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Master of Urban Design at the University of Michigan.  He is founding partner with Rania Ghosn of the studio DESIGN EARTH.  His research investigates aesthetic forms of environmental engagement to visualize how urban systems transform the Earth.  The work of DESIGN EARTH is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, the Times Museum in Guangzhou, SFMOMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  Jazairy is co-author of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; 2018), The Planet After Geoengineering (New York: Acatar 2021), and Geographies of Trash (New York: Actar, 2015).  He is founding editor of New Geographies and editor-in-chief of NG 4: Scales of the Earth (Harvard GSD, 2010).  Jazairy holds a Doctorate of Design from Harvard University, a Master of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from La Cambre in Brussels.  Jazairy is recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League of New York’s Prize for Young Architects + Designers and ACSA Faculty Design Awards (2014, 2017) for outstanding work in environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.

How do we make sense of the Earth at a moment in which it is presented in crisis?  In this talk, I engage the speculative project– as expounded through drawings, models, and material artifacts–as one possible medium to reassemble publics around representations of the Earth.  The project here becomes a medium that critically synthesizes spatial knowledge across scales to speculate on how to live with the many forms of environmental externalities, including oil extraction, deep-sea mining, ocean acidification, air pollution, space debris, and a host of other social-ecological issues.  The talk is an exploration of media devices to exhibit the Earth – terrarium, aquarium, planetarium through three projects from Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment.

Sponsored by: Architecture, Environmental and Urban Studies, Experimental Humanities