Rice School of Architecture is pleased to announce The Sixth Sphere, an exhibition curated by Brittany Utting.
“The Sixth Sphere is the inaugural exhibition in our new curatorial program, Exhibitions at Rice, which aims to look at our world differently,” said Igor Marjanović, William Ward Watkin Dean of the Rice School of Architecture. “I am delighted that the exhibition of such planetary scope and ambition occupies this prominent spot, and I look forward to the global dialogues that it will imbue.”
Entangled within the earth’s five natural spheres—the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere—is a sixth: the technosphere. Identified by geologist Peter K. Haff as an emerging paradigm of the anthropocene, the technosphere includes the sites, institutions, and infrastructures of industrial production and extraction.
Architecture is part of the technosphere, hardening its systems and proliferating its forms. Encompassing factories and farmlands, ports and telecommunication networks, mines and landfills, highways and suburbs, the technosphere is more than just the accumulated material of the built environment. It is a planetary entanglement of physical infrastructures, geopolitical relations, and digital networks, enabling the continuous movement of matter, energy, and information.