Shaping Climate Objects
The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology, at Berggruen Arts & Culture Palazzo Diedo. Photograph by Joan Porcel
The MIT Department of Architecture invites you to Shaping Climate Objects, a closing conversation for the Next Earth Exhibition at Palazzo Diedo, and a preview of its accompanying publication, Climate Objects (MIT/SA+P Press, 2026).
The event brings together designers, theorists, and researchers to reflect on the idea that any architectural project today produces an object with agency in the climate crisis. Throughout the last decade, the MIT School of Architecture and Planning has centered its work on the interconnected influence of buildings on multiple ecologies, building on the department’s long history and MIT’s vision for the future.
MIT’s contribution to the Next Earth exhibition, Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet, interrogates the creative and cognitive realignments necessary to build a global future. The exhibition features 37 works in progress by MIT faculty, each displaying a sample of a world that reimagines topics ranging from material supply chains, energy expenditure, modes of practice, and advances in construction. These works speculate on how architecture relates to, and actively reconfigures the planet, offering new paradigms for shaping, narrating, computing, and rebuilding our world. The objects at the center of these re-worldings form the bases for our discussion, and for the forthcoming book, Climate Objects.
Like the exhibition, the book foregrounds methods over solutions; it understands the climate crisis not as a background condition but as a mode of research and a way of seeing relations that architecture has long shaped. The panel will include a response by Lionel Devlieger, Associate Professor in 'Cultural and Material History of Architectural Practice', Ghent University
Join us at Palazzo Diedo for a collective reflection on architectures made through, and for, our changing planet.
Participants
With Sheila Kennedy, Nicholas de Monchaux, Caitlin Mueller, Skylar Tibbits, Calvin Zhong (MIT), Respondent: Lionel Devlieger, Associate Professor in 'Cultural and Material History of Architectural Practice', Ghent University.
Exhibition curated by Ana Miljački, Nicholas de Monchaux & Calvin Zhong