Forum Lecture: Geostories
Monday, October 27, 2025 from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
- In-person event
- The Pit, Architecture Building, Carleton University
- 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6
2025-2026 Forum Lecture Series
Speaker: Rania Ghosn, DESIGN EARTH, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Free and open to the public
Presented by the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, with support from Carleton Climate Commons.
How might the architectural imagination attempt to make sense of forms of planetary violence, including those of the climate crisis? In Geostories, DESIGN EARTH deploys the architectural project — drawing and narrative — to synthesize research across spatial scales, systems, and disciplines. It speculates on how to live with various matters of externalities, including those of technology, extraction, heritage, extinction, and a host of other social-environmental issues, all woven together in myth, fables, and devices of wonder.
Rania Ghosn is an associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is director of the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Urbanism program and founding principal of DESIGN EARTH.
Her work makes public the climate crisis by charting how technological systems have transformed the earth and imagining ways of living with such legacy geographies on a damaged planet.
She is co-author of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2022), Geographies of Trash (2015), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), Climate Inheritance (2023). Her work includes the ongoing “Elephant in the Room,” an animation series of figures from Natural History museums that reimagine cultural institutions for climate action.
The work of DESIGN EARTH is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection and has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, V&A Museum, Bauhaus Museum Dessau, SFMOMA, Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, Matadero Madrid, Milano Triennale, Oslo Architecture Triennale, and the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
Ghosn’s writing has been published in Log, Perspecta, Avery Review, Architectural Design, Journal of Architectural Education, New Geographies, Volume, San Rocco, Science Fiction Studies, Thresholds, [bracket], and numerous edited volumes on infrastructure, technology, pedagogy, and climate.
She is a recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, and ACSA Faculty Design Awards for outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.
Ghosn holds a Bachelor of Architecture from American University of Beirut, a Master of Geography from University College London, and a Doctor of Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was founding editor of the journal New Geographies and editor of its issue “Landscapes of Energy.”
Prior to MIT, she was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University.