GEOFUTURES
Post-Professional Program in Architecture and Urbanism
Rensselaer School of Architecture
Chris Perry, Director

Geofutures endeavors to convert crisis into opportunity by harnessing both the pressures of a planet at risk and the promise of emerging environmental technologies to generate a broad spectrum of possible, if not probable, urban and architectural futures for the twenty-first century.

Premised on the belief that the challenges of the contemporary city are far too complex for any one discipline to manage on its own, Geofutures brings together architects, landscape architects, and technologists to address a wide range of interdisciplinary problems, questions, and issues.

The program places emphasis on theoretical speculation and design experimentation.  In this respect, Geofutures situates itself within a long and rich history of urban futurism particular to the discipline of architecture.  This history includes such visionary proposals as Antonio Sant’Elia’s La Citta Nuova (1914), a collection of drawings depicting the new industrial city of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1932), a prescient image of what would be referred to sixty years later as landscape urbanism, and Kenzo Tange’s Plan for Tokyo (1960), a postwar reimagination of the city as infrastructural prosthetic.

As such, the program challenges students to mine the daring and often prophetic urban visions of previous generations as a means of speculating on the future of the city in the twenty-first century.  And in much the same way that the emerging literary genre climate fiction, or cli-fi, attempts to project a set of possible futures for the Anthropocenic Age, Geofutures aspires to a similar level of speculation by reconsidering the very idea of the city itself.  In an age marked by the haunting effects of climate change, in which the needs of humans and those of the natural environment have become increasingly intertwined and the conventional distinctions between artificial and natural more and more ambiguous, the traditional conception of the city as an anthropomorphic artifact serving the exclusive desires of the human race must be reconsidered and ultimately reimagined.  The Geofutures Post Professional Program in Architecture and Urbanism at Rensselaer endeavors to do precisely that.

For more information visit the Geofutures website at geofutures.arch.rpi.edu