JAE features climate-themed articles by Profs. Zachary Colbert and Lisa Moffitt

Volume 78, Issue 2 (2024) positions energy transition as requiring a radical reimagining of world systems at multiple scales, leveraging methods and resources toward environmental justice. The theme editors are Associate Professor Rania Ghosn (MIT) and Billy Fleming (Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania).

In an essay titled Owning a River: Whiteness, Property Rights, and Counter-Representations on the Colorado Plateau, Associate Professor Zachary Colbert examines property rights, water infrastructure, and architectural media, revealing how whiteness is ingrained in the landscape, perpetuating systemic inequities and ecological injustices.

Colbert underscores the need for a critical reorientation away from whiteness and property rights, advocating for Indigenous-led stewardship and alternative narratives that prioritize inclusivity and storytelling.

Read it here.

In the same issue, Associate Professor Lisa Moffitt co-wrote a piece, Toronto’s Terrestrial Reef: Biorock’s Infrastructural Biogeochemical Futures, with intern architect Cameron Penney.

Based on Penney’s 2023 Master of Architecture thesis project, the essay focuses on a single project figure: a series of photographs of biorock models grown in a self-constructed wet lab and analyzed in a chemistry dry lab.

Drawing from model histories in architecture and science, the article suggests that as physical models increasingly detach from their conventional disciplinary roles, their capacity to make worlds — in this case, a biogeochemical world of synthetic geological accretions — radically expands.

Read it here.