{"id":125,"date":"2025-12-01T01:32:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T06:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/?p=125"},"modified":"2025-12-01T20:59:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T01:59:19","slug":"design-earths-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/2025\/12\/01\/design-earths-animals\/","title":{"rendered":"Design Earth’s Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/h2>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The artistic and research practice of Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, under the collective name Design Earth, \u201cengages the medium of the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis.\u201d The project was founded in 2010, and, since then, they have written and illustrated various books and developed multiple exhibitions at international biennales and in museums such as MoMA, ArkDes Sweden, and Matadero Madrid. Ghosn and Jazairy are both professors of architecture (at MIT and UMichigan, respectively), and they utilize their research for the Design Earth<\/span> practice. Their work comes in many forms and explores many different facets of the climate crisis, but this collection will take a focused approach to just one aspect of Design Earth\u2019s speculative questions: How does climate change affect animals, and how can we imagine a different way for animals to interact with a human-structured world?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Design Earth<\/span> approaches these questions about animal life on Earth through various genres such as fable, speculative architectural drawing, and imagined interventions into the environmental systems which contribute to the climate crisis. The exhibition draws from four works by the collective: \u201cElephant in the Room\u201d, an illustrated fable about an elephant in a museum, <\/span>Geographies of Trash<\/span><\/i>, a book-length exploration of trash on Earth, <\/span>Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment, <\/span><\/i>a book about new ways of environmental engagement, and, finally, \u201cClimate Inheritance: Cautionary Tales of UNESCO World Heritage Sites\u201d which explores the impact of climate change on world heritage sites. Ghosn and Jazairy question the established ways of thinking about animals: as specimens to admire in museums while, simultaneously, the impact that human development projects have on their habitats is ignored. These speculative drawings imagine a world in which animals of all kinds have agency in how their habitat changes and in which they can express their desires directly to humans. They take recognizable forms such as the architectural drawing and the fable and make animal life visible where it is often ignored or not pictured at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part 1: Elephant in the Room, 2021<\/h3>\n

Elephant in the Room #4<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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The idiom \u201cthe elephant in the room\u201d is repurposed in this fable to mean both the character of the African elephant and the climate crisis. The elephant, usually a static figure to be admired in a museum, comes to life in order to decry the issue that allowed her to be placed in that museum in the first place. The protesting elephant\u2019s body tells the story of how she got to the museum: hunting practices turned her and her family from living beings to specimens. Her presence in the street, instead of stuck on a pedestal, echoes the texts on the billboard: \u201cENOUGH IS ENOUGH.\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elephant in the Room #9<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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The illustration zooms in on the inside of the elephant that was visible earlier in the story. This panel focuses on \u201cher reddish-brown eyes with German glass in their place\u201d and a small version of Greta Thunberg and her sign protesting for climate action. Time collapses in this panel. The elephant \u201cremembers it all,\u201d looking back to the moment of her death, and she also looks forward to other climate activists working towards the same goal of the recognition of climate change. The eye also looks out to \u201cmuseumsgoers\u201d within the world of the fable and to us, the viewers of this fable. The eye asks us to question what has been done to make the “elephant in the room\u201d of climate change visible so far and what can be done in the future.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elephant in the Room #19<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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The fable ends with a new institution made in place of the museum. The natural history museum and its policy of making living beings property has been dissected. It becomes the final resting place of the elephant, and the people of the fable\u2019s future use her body and ideas as a \u201cclimate action guide\u201d instead of following the ideas of \u201cdivision, dispossession, and violence\u201d that Design Earth identifies in the curatorial practices of museums. Finally, the fable invokes another idiom, \u201clook at the bigger picture,\u201d as the view zooms back out and compares the image of people coming together to fight climate change to the people sitting around looking at a sculpture of an elephant you might see in a museum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Part 2:\u00a0Geographies of Trash<\/em>, 2015<\/h3>\n

Preserve, Ground View.<\/b><\/h4>\n
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Geographies of Trash<\/em> is Design Earth’s response to the problem of the “management and processing of waste\u201d made by humans (10). They cite an image of a plastic bag floating in space to demonstrate the anxiety-inducing quality of the production of trash with nowhere for it to go. The book imagines new waste management systems in Michigan, specifically, that call attention to the space trash takes up, instead of maintaining the invisible operation that usually characterizes waste management. The project argues that by making trash more visible, it becomes less of an insidious and misunderstood force. In the nine sections of the book, the authors create a new way of looking at trash through the lens of climate change and provide \u201calternative aesthetics and forms of landfilling, recycling, burning, re-using and reusing\u201d (13). One section of the books focuses on an alternative to a landfill: a golf course made into a living landfill with a rich microbiome which makes trash biodegradable.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Preserve, A Bird’s Eye View, Ecological “dump” site<\/h4>\n
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The imagined golf course landfill in Michigan allows for all types of life to work together to manage trash. The authors conceptualizes this place, with \u201cbears, wolves, deer, and vultures\u201d, as a way to foster an environment where \u201ctrash is eaten, absorbed, and diffused, gradually [becoming] a vital component in preserving the natural ecology\u201d (114). This ecological system is directly in contrast to the real organization of landfills that use plastic fillers that make waste decomposition more difficult and impact animals, plants, and, ironically, humans negatively.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Part 3: Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment<\/em>, 2018<\/h3>\n

Towers on Wire #1: Tensile structures rest on the forest canopy to delimit ecological corridors that are critical for the survival of endangered elephants<\/h4>\n
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The opening of Design Earth\u2019s second book asks, \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with climate change?\u201d (11). The authors ponder how people can recognize changes on the daily and local level, but it becomes more difficult to understand issues like \u201cclimate\u201d or the \u201cglobal.\u201d Design Earth uses architectural drawings to ground the issue of climate change in legible, realistic representations and show \u201cenvironmental externalities as matters of concern for design\u201d (15). One of these sets of speculative drawings is named \u201cTowers on Wire.\u201d The set concerns deforestation of tropical rainforests and imagines a restoration of these forests through a collection of inverted towers. The towers help new trees to grow by collecting humidity, provide sites of recreation for humans, and \u201cestablish a continuity of habitat and ecological corridors that are critical for the survival of endangered species like the elephants and the orangutan\u201d (43). Development in rainforests becomes generative instead of destructive.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Apart, We Are Together #1 and #2<\/h4>\n

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Similar to the place-specific exploration of Michigan in <\/span>Geographies of Trash<\/span><\/i>, the set of drawings from <\/span>Geostories<\/span><\/i> entitled \u201cApart, We Are Together\u201d focuses on the ecology and ecological futures of California. The project would build a giant cross-shaped structure across the length of California and form a green space in order to combat rampant drought in the state. The cross represents salvation from the extreme dryness, and in this green space, the artists visualize a \u201csanctuary for climate refugees\u201d (86), humans and animals alike. They show sea animals swimming off the coast, as water both at sea and on land should be cherished.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pacific Aquarium #1: Parliament of Refugees<\/h4>\n
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Human interference is everywhere, including the vast space of the Pacific Ocean. Design Earth mentions the Clarion-Clipperton zone, where rare earth metal mining is becoming popular for battery and alloy production. They imagine a new system of the \u201ccohabitation of economy and ecology\u201d (114) in the zone instead of the purely extractive and destructive system that exists now. The drawing called \u201cParliament of Refugees\u201d shows what the authors call \u201can assembly of Anthropocene things, such as sea turtles, plastic bags, CO3(2-) molecules, scallops, bleached corals, drowning wetlands, hammerhead sharks, algae, Homo sapiens, Brighamia rockii and Nihoa finches\u201d (114) If the ocean is to be governed, all types of life must be represented in the discussion.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Introduction \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The artistic and research practice of Rania Ghosn and El […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5918,"featured_media":230,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5918"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ams354-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}