CACP Speaker Series continues April 15 with architect and geographer Rania Ghosn

By Nicole Chavez,
College of Architecture, Construction and Planning

(April 10, 2015) -- The UTSA College of Architecture, Construction and Planning (CACP) Speaker Series continues with Rania Ghosn, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning and partner with El Hadi Jazairy of Design Earth. Her talk, “Geostories,” will be presented free and open to the public at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 15 in the Buena Vista Building Aula Canaria (BV 1.328) on the UTSA Downtown Campus.

Ghosn’s work examines the urban condition at the scale of the territory to open up a range of aesthetic and political concerns for design research. Her current project focuses on technological systems, such as those of energy, trash and agriculture, as objects of inquiry into our ideas and practices of the urban environment. Forms of economy, politics and environments are constructed through our technological relations with the materials of the Earth, or what we refer to as ‘resources’ and ‘wastes.’ However, such geographies often remain invisible from the viewpoint of urban centers. Ghosn argues that the erasure of geography is a ‘designed’ misrepresentation that externalizes the costs of the urban process and conceals disagreements regarding the organization of the world and its resources.

Ghosn is a recognized scholar who studies the relationship of energy and space. She is particularly interested in infrastructures built for energy purposes and how they interact with both a built cityscape and a natural landscape.

Her essay, “Where Are the Missing Spaces? The Geography of Some Uncommon Interests,” was published in the Yale Architectural Journal Perspecta 45, which uses the concept of agency to investigate the ways in which architects can become change-agents within their own discipline and in the world at large. In reference to the Common Interests corporate advertising campaign of Total, the global oil and gas corporation, Ghosn writes, “The erasure of geography is twice political. The first act of violence compresses geographies of energy systems into a thin line. The infrastructure that makes possible connections between the two landscapes, including a myriad of tankers, terminal ports and policy documents, is abstracted so that externalities — environmental or social — are excluded from representation. For if geography does not exist or matter then energy corporations cannot be held accountable for the social and environmental transformations brought about by their operations.”

Her talk, “Geostories,” proposes a research question: If the erasure of geography is an aesthetic-political project, could the reassertion of the geographic allow designers to intervene within power and its representations, thus reorganizing structures of influence? Ghosn will utilize a series of project-stories in her talk to propose the geographic as both a conceptual worldview and a set of representational tools for a political materialist design agency. These geostories explore possibilities to imagine and represent the relationship between humans and techno-environmental systems while also addressing recurrent

Ghosn is a founding editor of the Harvard Graduate School of Design journal New Geographies and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy which spatializes the relations of energy and space mapping, in particular the physical, social and representational geographies of oil. Her current book project, Geographies of Oil across the Middle East: The Trans-Arabian Pipeline, traces the biography of a transnational oil transport infrastructure to document territorial transformations associated with the region’s incorporation into a global fossil fuel economy. Ghosn is also co-author of the forthcoming Geographies of Trash (New York: Actar, 2015), for which she and partner El Hadi Jazairy received a 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award. The book charts the geographies of trash in Michigan across scales to propose five speculative projects that perform disciplinary controversies on the relations of technology, territory, and politics.

Ghosn has participated in symposia and lectured on matters of urban infrastructures in various venues, including Harvard GSD, PennDesign, Columbia GSAPP, Princeton School of Architecture, and The Architectural League of New York. Her essays have appeared in publications such as San Rocco, Journal of Architectural Education, MONU, Bracket, Thresholds, GSD Platform, and Perspecta. Prior to joining MIT, Ghosn was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University, where she organized a yearlong seminar series on energy and society. She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University, a Master of Geography from University College London, and a Bachelor of Architecture from American University of Beirut.

The UTSA College of Architecture, Construction and Planning Speaker Series brings design professionals from around the world to UTSA to share their expertise on a variety of topics with the local community. For this event, free parking is available in UTSA parking lot D-3 under IH-35.

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For more information, contact Nicole Chavez at nicole.chavez@utsa.edu or 210-458-3121.

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