The planetary crisis is inseparable from extractive geographies that render land, labor, and atmosphere as resources accelerating further climate breakdown and deepening social inequity through the feverish rush for energy transition minerals. These resource logics transform expansive territories into sites of extractive processes, embedded in historical patterns of accumulation that persist over time. Such systems cause differentiated harm and maintain power asymmetries across environmental, social, and political domains.

In 1876, Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition, the ‘International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine’, rendered territories as specimens, extraction as capital, and dispossession as an acceptable byproduct of these acts of classification. The exhibition staged the American landscape as an inexhaustible resource, showcasing the Appalachian coalfields, the Great Plains grain, and Southern cotton as material evidence of Manifest Destiny. This open project aims to revisit that exhibition to trace the extractive geographies it celebrated to their present conditions of depletion and toxicity and to the planetary crisis. The landscapes displayed as national wealth in 1876 now constitute the infrastructural and atmospheric conditions of the planetary crisis. From Pennsylvania’s coal seams to the petrochemical corridors of the Gulf Coast and from Midwestern aquifer depletion to mountaintop removal in West Virginia, these landscapes that were once celebrated remain active sites of extraction, toxicity, and contestation.

The open project considers ecology as entanglement, drawing on the works of Barad, Haraway, Stengers, Yusoff, and Liboiron. We define these extractive geographies as sites of deep accumulations of geological, colonial, and labor histories entangled across space and time.

Each student will engage with a distinct extractive geography through archival research and the creation of situated counter-narratives. These records will then be reassembled at a fictional Fairmount Park for the Counter-Centennial Exhibition. This will not be a display of territories but a forum constituted by them, where the extractive zones can speak back and propose reparative design actions that contribute to the exhibition’s legacy project.

Students’ propositional works as legacy projects will trace Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf’s example of founding a design school in response to shortcomings identified in the Women’s Pavilion at the 1876 exhibition and the surplus of funds. These works will contribute to reimagining the school, its curriculum, and its core components such as governance, infrastructure, and grounds with the ambition of allowing each student to express their aspirations through their individual disciplinary trajectories.

The open project is structured around three phases: Phase 01: The Investigative Act – Counter-Narratives, Phase 02: The Counter Centennial Exhibition, and Phase 03: The Legacy Project. The teaching and learning schedule includes a series of guest lectures and a range of media workshops aligned with each of the phases of the Open Project. Students will have the option to work across multiple media: mapping, narrating, image-making, and modeling, developing individual approaches that combine analog and digital techniques to create situated investigative methods and representations.

*Referencing Michael Marder’s book Energy Dreams: Of Actuality