Moving across space and time, from prehistory to the present and around the world, this fascinating volume explores the many ways in which the earth has been transformed by human effort. In discerning text, more than 150 fabulous photographs - many of them taken by some of the world's premier aerial photographers - and 21 arresting drawings, paintings, and other artworks, Designing the Earth examines such diverse works as clay dwellings in Chad and Mali, adobe pueblos in the American Southwest, mud-brick ziggurats in Babylon, ancient Egyptian funerary monuments, subterranean aqueducts in Iran, Native American effigy mounds, the Nazca lines of Peru, artificial islands in Japan, the Great Wall of China, Mount Rushmore, and earth-sheltered housing by Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as earthworks by contemporary artists such as Michael Heizer and Andy Goldsworthy. By considering the works in a larger design context, and by discussing their meaning, import, and use, author David Bourdon opens the reader's eyes to the formal and functional characteristics of earthworks around the world as he explores how people on different continents, unknown to each other, demonstrated remarkable similarities in the recontouring of their landscapes.

A revolutionary guide to designing humane, eco-conscious homes, buildings, and cities of the future. It is estimated that the earth's population will expand to an unprecedented nine billion people over the next century. This explosion in population is predicted to place further stress on our environment, deplete our natural resources, and lead to increases in anxiety and depression due to overcrowding. In this visionary and uplifting book, Teresa Coady offers readers new hope. Rebuilding Earth is her blueprint for designing and building the cities, buildings, and homes of tomorrow, resulting in more conscious, sustainable, and humane living. Coady shows us how we can shift from an outdated Industrial-Age framework to a more humane, Digital-Age framework. This revolutionary approach will enable communities to harness various forms of green energy and reduce the amount of material needed to build infrastructure while contributing to a healthier planet (and society). We can then experience a new sense of purpose, health, and happiness. Meaningful and lasting change, the author tells us, can only come through designing interconnected communities that are vibrant, resilient, and communal. Unlike most predictions of doom and gloom, Coady presents a refreshingly optimistic view of humanity and its future. This book will appeal to those in the construction, design and development finance industries, as well as anyone interested in improving their lives through understanding the connections between the environment and health.

How do we make sense of the Earth at a moment in which it is presented in crisis? To live in an epoch that is shaped by extensive environmental transformations is to be confronted with risks and uncertainties at scales larger than that of the planet. Paradoxically, while we worry that the sky may be falling on our heads, we remain so immobilized in part maybe because of our failures to comprehend the scales of a story that is difficult both to tell and to hear. Two Cosmograms mediates the dissonance between the environmental question at stake and the narrow repertoire of emotions and imaginations with which we try to understand these issues by exploring speculative fiction as the political art that integrates the story of the cosmos into our own life stories. In response to the expansion of infrastructural systems and resource exploitation beyond the Earth, the two projects -Neck of the Moon and Love your Monsters- engage the architectural imaginations of the Cosmos. The speculative fictions probe the politics and aesthetics of technological systems, both in the extra-planetary environment as well as here on Earth.

Provides inexpensive and practical ideas to improve the spiritual environment of one's home or office. Designs use universal geometry, non-toxic materials, and incorporate secrets proven to enhance abundance and well-being.

The Planet After Geoengineering is a graphic novel in five speculative fictions that imagine the worlds of climate modification technologies and their controversies. The term "geoengineering" refers to technologies that counteract the effects of anthropogenic climate change by deliberately intervening in Earth systems. In the midst of a climate crisis, and with disparate views on whether planetary-scale design is the appropriate response at all, The Planet After Geoengineering employs a speculative fiction approach to think with and against geoengineering as a form of planetary management. The graphic novel makes climate engineering and its controversies visible in a series of five stories that are collectively assembled into a planetary section from the deep underground to outer space. Each geostory--Petrified Carbon, Arctic Albedo, Sky River, Sulfur Storm, and Dust Cloud--depicts possible future Earths that we come to inhabit on the heels of a geoengineering intervention all while situating such promisory visions within a genealogy of climate-control projects from nineteenth-century rainmaking machines and volcanic eruptions to Cold War military plans. Such fabrications of an engineerable earth open a space to forge a new geo-politics that includes the actual Earth-- its dimensions, processes, and lifeforms --as constitutive of design and the planet. The Planet After Geoengineering book is the graphic novel companion to DESIGN EARTH's eponymous project at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Hashim Sarkis. With essays by Kathryn Yusoff, Benjamin Bratton and Holly Jean Buck.

For a number of years, the healthy and environment-friendly building material earth, in common use for thousands of years, has been enjoying increasing popularity, including in industrialized nations. In hot dry and temperate climate zones, earth offers numerous advantages over other materials. Its particular texture and composition also holds great aesthetic appeal. The second and revised edition of this handbook offers a practical systematic overview of the many uses of earth and techniques for processing it. Its properties and physical characteristics are described in informed and knowledgeable detail. The author’s presentation reflects the rich and varied experiences gained over thirty years of building earth structures all over the world. Numerous photographs of construction sites and drawings show the concrete execution of earth architecture. Prof. Dr. Gernot Minke is a professor at Universität Kassel, where he leads the Forschungslabor für Experimentelles Bauen. He has long concerned himself with developments in ecological building, and he has dealt with the building material clay in theory and practice since 1977. His book Building with Straw was also published by Birkhäuser.