Rania Ghosn

Her research and creative practice explore the architectural project as a medium to make public the climate crisis – to chart how urban technological systems have transformed the earth and to imagine ways of living with such legacy geographies on a damaged planet. Towards that, her design research methodology draws together environmental history, spatial representation across scales, speculative design in various media assemblies – publication, exhibition, and animation.

She is co-author of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (2022), Geographies of Trash (2015), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), and Climate Inheritance (2023). Her 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, representation, technology, and urbanism.

The work of Design Earth is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection and has been exhibited internationally, including at 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 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Recently, their Elephant in the Room series has animated a series of charismatic media figures from Natural History museums to reimagine cultural institutions for climate action.

She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University, a Master in Geography from University College London, and a Bachelor of Architecture from American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Prior to joining MIT, she was Assistant Professor at University of Michigan and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University, where she organized a yearlong seminar series on energy and society.