New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial
Meshworks Principal Guy Trangos is a member of the Harvard GSD New Geographies journal Editorial Board. He co-edited the eleventh annual issue, entitled ‘Extraterrestrial.’ It was published by Actar at the beginning of 2020.
New Geographies 11: Extraterrestrial explores the historical and contemporary consequence of our planetary relationship with outer space. It interprets this duality through the conceptual lens of ‘extraterrestrial,’ which engages an entangled zone of expanding practices in geography, landscape, and architecture, stretching Earth to space, and conversely, space to Earth. This issue questions the means through which space is forged as a condition extra to our own terra. Complicit within this imagination resides a deep political and economic logic that serves to territorialize outer space as an exception to, and extension of, Earth. These critical processes are revealed as not extra at all, but rather distinctly of terra. Through a series of written, photographic, and representational investigations, this edition of New Geographies builds on earlier studies of outer space from science, technology and society, as well as from the design disciplines, history, and critical geography. It reinforces the need for humanity’s changing relationship with outer space to be recorded, critiqued, and theorized from a breadth of academic traditions and projected within design discourse.