Geoscope 2: Worlds reinvents Buckminster Fuller’s pioneering 1960s ‘Geoscope’ concept in 2020s digital form, for 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale visitors.
Taking the form of a split sphere, the Geoscope 2: Worlds installation presents 20+ contemporary voices from throughout and beyond international architecture – ranging from the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima to the radical ecologist-philosopher Timothy Morton – and projects these across 42 internal facets in a kaleidoscope of global thought. AKT II was invited to be one of those voices and to provide a contribution to provoke thoughts around the biennale theme.
The pneumatically animated artwork is inspired by Daniel López-Pérez’s provocative and luminous book R. Buckminster Fuller: Pattern Thinking (Lars Müller Publishers, 2020) and conceived by the US architect Jesse Reiser. The project responds to the 2021 biennale theme How will we live together? by inverting both the globe and the question; visitors are invited to experience numerous perspectives and to consider the true, multifaceted nature of the planet and civilization that we’re trying to protect.
Geoscope 2: Worlds celebrates the diversity of how we think, act, and interact, together. The AKTII contribution centers on the urgency of understanding that our planet is under attack from within, and nature does not comprehend political boundaries.
AKT II’s computational design director Edoardo Tibuzzi says: “A lot of AKT II’s computational work explores the intangible qualities of our built world’s performance. Through our video in the Geoscope 2: Worlds, we’re making the past 20 years of our planet’s CO2 trajectory newly tangible, as a multi-sensory experience for festival visitors. The climate crisis is a shared problem, and to solve it we crucially need a shared understanding of its true nature. All of the satellite data that we’ve used is freely available online, but for many people this installation will be their first experience of really seeing clearly the growing catastrophe of our atmospheric CO2. We hope that this new perspective drives awareness throughout our design industry and helps focus all of our efforts away from the ‘country by country’ approach and towards the imperative, shared global endeavor.”
