Night White Skies

This week on Night White Skies is a 'Topical Interlude' - A fictional conversation between myself a Larry Page of Google and a look at NYC's Central Park in 2034.

This episode is a conversation with architectural designer and theorist Christopher Hight about two science fiction books;'The Drowned World' by J. G. Ballard, and 'Seveneves' by Neal Stephenson. The two books were published over 50 years apart. Both of these books are prime candidates for this show because they each do two things. The two books discuss an evolving Earth climate as well as an evolving human species. There is also quit a bit of difference within these two books. We see very different reasons for the climate change that's taking place, the plotlines occur over drastically different time scales, and the 'how' and 'what' that occurs to human evolution is different. The two books also open a conversation about how designers and architects can rethink the concept of resilience regarding the environment.

It's a great article about the work of NASA and others putting humans in space. To put people in space, you have to create environments for them to live. In the early 1970's NASA created big plans for new space colonies for human to live in. But what kind of nature would we be bringing up to space? If the same nature that we know of down here on earth doesn't have to abide by the same rules of light, soil, atmosphere and gravity up there in space, how might it be different And therefore how might that shape us as humans. How might this change our own perspectives and relationships to nature back here on Earth.

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in her field, she has authored more than 120 articles and chapters and is author or editor of more than 15 books, including The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, Designs on Nature, and The Ethics of Invention. Her work explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies. She founded and directs the STS Program at Harvard; previously, she was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell. She has held distinguished visiting appointments at leading universities in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US. Jasanoff served on the AAAS Board of Directors and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the University of Ghent Sarton Chair, an Ehrenkreuz from the Government of Austria, and membership in the Royal Danish Academy. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente.

Bradford Bouley is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a fellow at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. His research focuses on the histories of religion and science in the early modern, especially Italian, context. His first book, Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017. His work has also appeared in Catholic Historical Review, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and the Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo. He is currently writing a second book entitled The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder and Warfare in Early Modern Italy, which will discuss food supply, warfare, and some early episodes in environmental history.

Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of architecture, design, and artificial intelligence. She is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which tells the radical history of AI's impact on design and architecture and how it poured the foundation for contemporary digital design. Molly is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Architecture. Previously, she was an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, adjunct faculty at Art Center in Pasadena, CA, and an associate professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. Molly cut her teeth on the web in 1994 and has since worked with groundbreaking studios, consultancies, and corporations. She holds a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University and an M.E.D from the Yale School of Architecture.

Christopher Schaberg received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, where he specialized in twentieth-century American literature and critical theory. At Loyola, Dr. Schaberg teaches courses on contemporary literature and nonfiction, cultural studies, and environmental theory. He also teaches a first-year seminar on airports in American literature and culture. He is the author of three books on airports: The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2012), The End of Airports (2015), and Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017). He has co-edited two essay collections: Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014, with Robert Bennett) and Airplane Reading (2016, with Mark Yakich). He is currently completing a book called The Work of Literature In An Age of Post-Truth, which is about teaching, reading, and writing in the early twenty-first century. Dr. Schaberg is founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of an essay and book series called Object Lessons which explores the hidden lives of ordinary things. This series offers hands-on opportunities for Loyola students who are interested in nonfiction writing as well as working in editing and publishing.

Liam Young is an Australian born architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. Building his design fictions from the realities of present, Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time Magazine, and Dazed and Confused and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University and now runs an M.A. in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc. Young manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.

The United States in 1930's experienced what is referred to as the dust bowl in which a combination of poor farming and business practices caused massive wind erosion called 'black blizzards' that resulted in many farmers abandoning their farms in states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and beyond, just as the Great Depression was underway.

The research story here is about one of the initiatives from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal inniatives. This being the creation of a 'shelter belts', more precisely, the planting of more than 220 million trees from North Dakota down through Texas in a seven year time frame to help stabilize soil and rejuvenate farming communities…. Essentially, an act of planning and environmental conservation to be better prepared for a future of farming in the Great Plains.

Sarah Thomas Karle is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture in the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska where she teaches undergraduate courses in landscape architecture.

David Karle is an Associate Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

Ricardo de Ostos creates speculative fictions that envision architectural projects in shifting environmental and cultural contexts. He lives, works and teaches in London at both, the Architectural Association and The Bartlett School of Architecture. He is the co-director of NaJa & deOstos studio and co-author of 'The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad' (Springer Wien/New York, 2006) 'Ambiguous Spaces' (Princeton Press, 2007) and 'Scavengers and Other Creatures in Promised Lands' (fall 2017, AA).

NaJa & deOstos

Ambigious Territory