W 9:30–12:00
Anderson Hall, Room 153
Geology is a conception of the planet’s surface as thick, resource-rich, and energy-latent, forming slowly in the deep time of the earth. Laced within its dense layers of rock and shifting plates, the crust contains the raw materials and carbon fuels of the technosphere: bands of iron ore, veins of mineral deposits, seams of coal, and vast fields of oil. Our everyday worlds are sourced from these geologies—fracking, cracking, mining, drilling, processing, and burning—feeding a supply chain essential to the production and powering of the built environment. Critically, the materials themselves have spatial qualities and attitudes, producing a complex infrastructure of capital, energy, and heat. Yet while these geologies constitute the substructure of modern life—determining its urban scales, circulatory flows, and organizational forms—they also devastate landscapes, bodies, and climates. Learning from spatial and material tactics that intercede in these extractive processes, this seminar seeks to trouble the persistence and durability of the hydrocarbon toward a deeper conception of geology: a planetary assemblage of landscapes, ecologies, organisms, technologies, and atmospheres. Through reading discussions, deep mapping exercises, field visits, and visual research explorations, “Deep Geologies” looks to the entanglement of architecture, extraction, and the Anthropocene to imagine new practices of terrestrial care.