Architecture as Environmental Media: Rendering the Planetary explores the relationship between climate change and representation in architectural production. As design disciplines confront the changing landscapes and consequences of climate breakdown, media for communicating socio-environmental relations play an increasingly critical role in defining new narratives for the future of our planet. To trouble the emergent conditions of the Anthropocene, designers must move between scales and across disciplines to develop new structures of knowledge and tools of representation: from the embodied to the technical, and the investigative to the projective. The voices gathered in this volume ask: what stakes are embedded in contemporary architectural environmental media, and how are designers reimagining this media landscape today? Chapters in the book explore counter-cartographies of migration and materials, forest ecologies and theories of abundance, hyperreal visualization and environmental simulation, architecture’s extractive and colonial systems, and pedagogies and practices for environmental futures. This book organizes these efforts into three threads of media practice: rendering visible, rendering sensible, and rendering actionable. These practices serve to reveal conditions made invisible by the dominant forces of capitalism, engage alternative modes of sensing our environment, and foster new forms of action and agency against extractive systems. While these categories are inextricably intertwined, they represent distinct tactical approaches to media production, each exploring possible methods to develop new knowledge systems, shift aesthetic regimes, and transform collective politics.

 

Editor: Daniel Jacobs

Contributors: Debbie Chen, Danika Cooper, Nathalie Frankowski, Cruz Garcia, Dan Handel, Summer Islam, Daniel Jacobs, Ali Ismail Karimi, Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee, Galen Pardee, Andrea Trimarchi, and Leah Wulfman

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Graphic Design: Jisung Park

Publisher: Routledge, 2026

Purchase book HERE.