Climate Inheritance
2022-23 Mellon Faculty Grant
World Heritage at Risk
About
The impacts of climate change on World Heritage Sites—from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galápagos Islands—have garnered attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to convey the urgency of the climate crisis.
Taking literally the ubiquitous assertion that heritage is for future generations, the speculative architectural drawings of Associate Professor Rania Ghosn’s Climate Inheritance visualize pervasive climate issues and risks all while reckoning with the complexity of both “heritage” and “climate.”
Previously exhibited at Bauhaus Museum Dessau, the project continues at MIT through a graduate workshop and publication.
Schedule
Lecture: Climate Inheritance
CMES Environmental Studies of the Middle East Speaker Series
September 20, 2023 / 6–7:30pm
Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Room 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge
Climate Inheritance Book Launch
May 20, 2023
Giardini della Marinaressa, Riva dei Sette Martiri, Venice, Italy
Hosted by the European Cultural Centre in conjunction with the 2023 Biennale Architettura.
Climate Inheritance at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Shenzhen)
December 18, 2022 – March 12, 2023
GDH City • Jinpi Fang (formerly Kingway Brewery), Luohu District, Shenzhen, China
4.183 Architectural Design Workshop — World Heritage, Climate Inheritance
Spring 2022
“Climate Inheritance” is a design research and speculation workshop that investigates how to conceptualize, visualize, project, and narrate the impacts of climate change on World Heritage.
Cautionary Tales of UNESCO World Heritage Sites Exhibition
June 24 – October 3, 2021
Bauhaus Museum Dessau, Black Box
Gropiusallee 38
06846 Dessau-Roßlau
Germany
COVID-19 nearly brought global tourism and its infrastructures to a standstill. The resulting vacuum offers an opportunity for thinking of ways to address the collective responsibility involved in inheriting a planet amidst climate crisis. For this exhibition, El Hadi Jazairy and Rania Ghosn of Design Earth showcase nine iconic UNESCO world heritage sites as figures of the climate crisis. Their aim is to ground our abstract imagination of the climate crisis in these familiar and symbolically significant places. The case studies also provide crucial examples of a wide range of climate effects, from rising sea levels to species extinction and melting glaciers. Taken together, Climate Inheritance visualizes events and values that divide and define our planetary past and future, including systemic patterns of violence, racism, and displacement.
Collaborators
Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at MIT and founding partner, with El Hadi Jazairy, of DESIGN EARTH. Ghosn’s research engages the territories of technological systems to address aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism in the age of the environment. Her scholarship integrates geography in a design methodology that brings together spatial history, geographic representation, speculative design, and public assemblies.
MIT CAST Profile: Rania Ghosn
Biography: MIT Architecture Department
Website: design-earth.org
El Hadi Jazairy is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan and currently Research Scientist at the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism where his research focuses on Urbanism and Energy Systems. He is also the founding partner of the award-winning practice DESIGN EARTH.
Biography: University of Michigan
Website: design-earth.org
Credits
Design Earth project team:
Rania Ghosn
El Hadi Jazairy
Anhong Li
Emma Jurczynski
with initial contributions by:
Marco Nieto
Zhifei Xu
In the Media
Perspecta 54: Atopia: “Cautionary Tales for UNESCO World Heritage” (2021)