Rania Ghosn

Rania Ghosn is Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding director, with El Hadi Jazairy, of DESIGN EARTH. Beginning in January 2025, she is incoming director of the SMArchS Urbanism program. 

Her research and creative practice make public the climate crisis by charting how urban technological systems have transformed the earth and imagining ways of living with such legacy geographies on a damaged planet. Her design research methodology draws together environmental history, spatial representation across scales, speculative design, and various media assemblies—publication, exhibition, and animation. She is co-author of Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment (3rd ed. 2022; [2018]), Geographies of Trash (2015), The Planet After Geoengineering (2021), and Climate Inheritance (2023). Their ongoing project, titled "Elephant in the Room," is a series of animations of figures from Natural History museums that are brought back to life to reimagine cultural institutions for climate action. Her writing has been published in Log, Perspecta, Avery Review, Architectural Design, Journal of Architectural Education, New Geographies, Volume, San Rocco, Science Fiction Studies, Thresholds, [bracket], and numerous edited volumes on infrastructure, technology, pedagogy, and climate. The work of Design Earth is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection and has been exhibited internationally, including at Venice Biennale, V&A Museum, Bauhaus Museum Dessau, SFMOMA, Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, Matadero Madrid, Milano Triennale, Oslo Architecture Triennale, and Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. 

Ghosn is recipient of the United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, and ACSA Faculty Design Awards for outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.  Her work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation, MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), MIT Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS), and Taubman College Research on the City, among others.  She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from American University of Beirut, a Master of Geography from University College London, and a Doctor of Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was founding editor of the journal New Geographies and editor of its issue "Landscapes of Energy." Prior to MIT, Rania was Assistant Professor at University of Michigan Taubman College and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University. She is currently on the editorial board of JAE – Journal of Architectural Education [2022-2025] and has co-edited the issue titled "Worlding. Energy. Transitions."