F 9:30–12:00 p.m.
TBD
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, these materials 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:
an assemblage of ecologies, technologies, and new planetary imaginaries. Moving through a range of topics that span from the geo-logic and the geo-cosmic to the geo-aesthetic, this seminar reimagines the relationship between architecture and extraction in the Anthropocene.