Draw Me the Earth Whole

… Technocultural people must study how to live in actual places, cultivate practices of care, and risk ongoing face-to-face encounters with unexpected partners.” Donna Haraway, Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations [1]

We live in an epoch that is shaped by climate catastrophes with risks and uncertainties on a planetary scale. On graph after graph, in metric after metric— carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, species extinction, particulate matter in the air— the rate of climate change is referred to as the “great acceleration.” A large amount of scientific research and images have sought to communicate the destructive impacts of the climate crisis. And yet, the climate story is difficult both to tell and to hear, both to comprehend and to act on. For scientists, journalists, activists, and designers, the question of how to bring climate matters to public concern is open and urgent. How might the architectural imagination make sense of the Earth at a moment in which the planet is presented in crisis?

Climate, meaning the statistics of weather over a defined time span, does not manifest itself in any single moment, event, or location and can never be directly experienced. In contrast to the immediately experienceable weather event, climate is inherently mediated. The only way it can be apprehended is through systems of data and modeling, including cultural forms—narratives, vocabularies, images, objects, and myths. In other words, climate—as it is imagined and acted upon—needs to be understood culturally. “Climate,” writes geographer Mike Hulme, “is weather which has been cultured, interpreted, and acted on by the imagination, through storytelling and material technologies.”[2] Approaching climate this way, adds Hulme, demands an “explicitly geographical and cultural interrogation of how people live climatically.”[3] After all, “climate,” derived from the Greek klinein (to lean, rest, recline, bend), was originally a geographical term denoting a position on the Earth defined by latitude (i.e., the specific inclination of the sun on a given place at summer solstice).[4] Retrieving this meaning of climate—geographically situated and differentiated—means considering climate not only from the standpoint of earth sciences as a global statistical average, but also as a situated cultural project of the geographic imagination. Storytelling becomes a method by which to make sense of and relate to a here and now that is otherwise difficult to tell and hear and engenders ways of seeing and knowing the many externalities of our time.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)