New Architectural Imaginaries: Representing Climate Crisis on a Planetary Scale

Abstract

Yusoff and Gabrys (2011, 519), in their inspiring article “Climate Change and the Imagination”, stated that “[r]epresenting climate change is an imaginative and creative act that joins the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, although the historical forms that constitute these representational troupes differ markedly.” The climate crisis in the epoch of the Anthropocene has expanded among geographies to a planetary scale. Thus, the phenomenon of the climate crisis is a circumstance that needs to be examined in multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional, multi-temporal, and multi-scalar terms. This expansion has also affected the agency of architectural representation since the climate crisis raises cultural, ethical, political, and societal problems; poses new questions; and reforges new architectural and planetary imaginaries. Thus, this study explores the role of the architects in developing the visual discourse of the climate crisis in the epoch of the Anthropocene by focusing on the works exhibited at the biennales. By taking the projects of Neyran Turan’s ‘Architecture as Measure’ at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia Pavilion of Turkey in 2021 and Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy’s ‘Of Oil and Ice’ at the 13th Sharjah Biennale in 2017 as cases, this paper aims to elaborate on the potentials of the agencies of architectural drawings, models, and installations. In short, the paper will discuss how these various architectural representation mediums, as possible critical and projective tools, have the capacity to create imaginative expressions by narrating and producing site-specific geographic portraits of the impacts of the climate crisis.