LAUNCH: LANDSCAPES OF ENERGY NEW GEOGRAPHIES 02

LAUNCH: THURSDAY, FEB 11, 7PM
LANDSCAPES OF ENERGY
New Geographies 02

Edited by Rania Ghosn.
Guest speakers: Rania Ghosn, Hashim Sarkis, Charles Waldheim.

Energy infrastructures deploy space at a large scale, yet they remain invisible because the creation of value in the oil regime has long externalized spatial costs, sliding them out of sight and away from design's agency. Contemporary environmental, political, and financial crises have brought energy once again to the forefront of design concerns. Rarely, however, do practices of sustainable design-efficient building skins, islands of self-sufficiency, positive-energy machines-address the spatiality of energy systems. Instead, they tend to emphasize a renewable/nonrenewable binary that associates environmental costs exclusively with the infrastructure of oil and overlooks the geographic imperative of all forms of energy.

Volume 2 of New Geographies proposes to historicize and materialize the relations of energy and space, and map some of the physical, social, and representational geographies of oil, in particular. By making visible this infrastructure, Landscapes of Energy is an invitation to articulate design's environmental agency and its appropriate scales of intervention.

Contributors to New Geographies #2 include: Ivan Illich, John May, Carola Hein, Gavin Bridge, Abdellatif Benachenhou and El Hadi Jazairy, Santiago del Hierro and Gary Leggett, Andrew Barry, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov, Martin Melosi, Maria Kaika, Geoff Manaugh, Pierre Bélanger, Kazys Varnelis and Robert Sumrell, Jean Robert, Mirko Zardini.

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