Architectural Worlding between the Global and the Planetary

In 2023, Liam Young premiered The Great Endeavour, a work of speculative architecture in the form of a film describing the “greatest construction project in history,” a global geoengineering scheme to draw down atmospheric carbon, including interventions from the North Sea to Arabian peninsula and beyond. The film describes a project in science fictional world-building, or worlding, which takes the entire globe as its object, a project that would reshape the surface of the earth, but that stops short of intervening in the cosmological underpinnings of Western neoliberal capitalism. Of course, the estrangement produced by this critical dystopia is perhaps Young’s intention, asking: at what scale does a terraforming project become larger than the project of a transition from Western neoliberal capitalism? There is a cosmological position undergirding this terraforming project, a techno-euphoric totalitarian image of the world which does not admit, to use Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s word, "com-possibility" with other images of the world. <br/><br/>This paper probes how diverse cosmologies are revealed through their consequent worldings in architecture, supplying world-images that reframe the project of architectural sustainability from techno-positivism to new relationships with territory. Remembering Gayatri Spivak’s distinction between the global and planetary, and Arturo Escobar’s imperative to imagine “a world where many worlds fit,” this paper discusses worldbuilding projects in sustainable architecture with reference to queer feminist positions on worlding in Haraway, Butler, the philosophical project of Yuk Hui, and to discourses in minoritarian