Christina Leigh Geros

Christina’s research explores the edges of architectural practice as it intersects with environmental conflicts and social technologies, both historical and emergent.

Christina’s practice engages with a multiplicity of media, knowledge structures, and methods of dialogue to explore the field of environmental architecture through the design of online platforms, multimedia installations, publications, and lectures as forms of activist research. Currently, Christina is a research fellow for Monsoon Assemblages, an ERC-funded project hosted at the University of Westminster, and a tutor for the MA Environmental Architecture Programme. Previously, she was the Design Director for anexact office and the Design Research Strategist for PetaBencana.id, an applied research project in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her work focuses on designing strategies of implementation and interfaces of investigation that bridge across platform, scope, and inquiry.

As a research and design contributor, her work has been featured in several publications, including Architectural Design, WIRED: Japan, Harvard GSD Platform [6, 7, &8], and Landscape Architecture Frontiers. As a collaborator, her work has been widely and internationally exhibited, including Broken Nature [2019] in the XX Triennale do Milano, Incomplete Urbanism [2016] at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore, and Constructive Response to Natural Disasters [2017] at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. From 2015-2017, Christina’s winning proposal for Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition, Latent [e]scapes, was installed in the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Garden in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(2015–2016) #Voices, Jakarta, Indonesia, Fulbright National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow.

(2014) Redefining Urban: Kotzebue, Alaska as a case study for the dual influences of settlement and junction, Penny White Prize, Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

(2014) Latent [e]scapes, Radcliffe Public Art Competition, Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Harvard University.

(2013) Move Me River, Radjawali Research Grant, Harvard Kennedy School Indonesia Programme.

(2008) American Institute of Architects (AIA) Young Architects Merit Award.

Exhibitions (selected):

(2021) ‘Between the Dragonfly and the Barometer’, Venice Architecture Biennale (with Monsoon Assemblages + Office of Experiments).

(2019) ‘Emergent and Erratic: Monsoonal Transmogrification of Land, Air, and Sea’, Broken Nature, XX Triennale di Milano (with John Cook, Monsoon Assemblages).

(2017) ‘Same River, Twice’, Constructive Response to Natural Disasters, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (with anexact office and PetaBencana.id).

(2016) ‘Is the City a Laboratory?’, Incomplete Urbanism, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore (with Etienne Turpin, anexact office).

(2015-2017) ‘Latent [e]scapes’, Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Garden, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

(2015) ‘Intr[e]scapes’, Eco-Diversity, ACADIA, Reed Gallery, University of Cincinnati (with Gregory Spaw and Lee-Su Huang).

(2015) ‘Intr[e]scapes’, Georgetown GLOW Light Art Exhibition, Georgetown, Washington D.C. (with Gregory Spaw and Lee-Su Huang).

(2015) ‘#SoUrban #SoBrave’, Kirkland Gallery, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (with Zannah Mae Matson).

(2015) ‘Redefining Urban: Kotzebue, Alaska as a case study for the dual influences of settlement and junction’, Arctic States Symposium and Exhibition, OpenGrounds, University of Virginia (with Zannah Mae Matson).

(2014) ‘Rumpus Room’, Kirkland Gallery, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (with Gregory Spaw and Lee-Su Huang).

(2012) ‘Look.Out.House’, The American Institute of Architects: 2012 Centre for Emerging Professionals Annual Exhibition, Washington D.C. (with Matt Jordan).

Publications (selected):

(2021) Various chapters in Monsoon as Method, Actar Publishing, forthcoming*

(2020) ‘Conditionally Unstable’, The Work of Wind: Sea, Christine Shaw and Etienne Turpin (eds.), K Verlag and Blackwood Gallery, forthcoming*.

(2020) ‘Here be Dragons, Other Grounds’, Monsoon [+other] Grounds, University of Westminster, Lindsay Bremner and John Cook (eds.).

(2020) ‘Constructing the Monsoon: Colonial meteorological cartography, 1844-1944’, History of Meteorology, accepted for publication (with Beth Cullen).

(2020) ‘Designing Momentums: Site, Practice, Media as Landscape’, Architectural Design, vol. 90, no. 1, pp. 14-21.

(2019) ‘Emergent and Erratic: Monsoonal Transmogrification of Land, Air, and Sea’, Broken Nature, XX Triennale di Milano, P. Antonelli and A. Tannir (eds.), pp. 106-107 (with John Cook).

(2017) ‘Our Enemies are in Power: Zenzi Suhadi in conversation with Christina Leigh Geros, Anna-Sophie Springer, & Paulo Tavares’, Anna-Sophie Springer (ed.), Alifa Rachmadia Putri and Widya Aulia Rachmadia (trans.), Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago, Intercalations 03, pp. 164-179.

(2017) ‘Jakarta as Method: Shopping Malls, Streets, and Mosques’, Jakarta: Models of Collective Space for the Extended Metropolis, Felipe Correa and Clayton Strange (eds.), Harvard GSD.

(2016) ‘The Cries of a City’s Trill’, Landscape Architecture Frontiers, Habitat and Biodiversity, vol. 4.3, no. 6, pp. 120-127.

Lectures (selected):

(2020) ‘Designing Ecologies, form Canals to Securitised Climate’, University of Greenwich.

(2019) ‘Drinking the Winds’, University of Greenwich.

(2019) ‘Here be Dragons’, Monsoon [+other] Grounds Symposium, University of Westminster.

(2019) ‘Design and Momentum: coordinating co-ordinates and co-ordinations in these times’, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art, Landscape Research by Design Seminar Series.

(2019) ‘Design and Momentum: coordinating co-ordinates and co-ordinations in these times’, University of Greenwich, Contemporary Theories of Landscape and Design Ecologies Seminar Series.

(2020, 2019) ‘Design and Momentum: coordinating co-ordinates and co-ordinations in these times’, Royal College of Art, Environmental Architecture.

(2018) ‘Between the Dragonfly and the Barometer: Knowing Weather, Constructing Climate’, Asian Extremes Conference: Climate, Meteorology and Disaster in History, University of Singapore (with Beth Cullen).

(2017) ‘For the City Yet to Come: The Citizen Cartographers of Jakarta and Japan’, Architectures, Nature & Data: The Politics of Environments, Tallinn, Estonia (with Elise Hunchuck).

(2017) ‘PetaBencana.id: software as infrastructure’, FOSS ASIA, Singapore.

(2016) ‘The Multiple Must be Made’, The Impossibility of Mapping (Urban Asia) Conference, Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore.

(2016) ‘#Voices, Jakarta’, Fulbright National Geographic Digital Storytelling, National Geographic Headquarters (public event), Washington D.C.

(2016) ‘Drawing Out the City’, Fulbright ASEAN Conference, Jakarta, Indonesia.

(2016) ‘Drawing the City Near’, @atamerica, US Embassy (public event), Jakarta, Indonesia (with Frank Sedlar).

(2015) ‘Visualizing and Channelling Forces’, The National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (NCBDS) (with Gregory Spaw).

Currently, Christina is a Research Fellow for Monsoon Assemblages, a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s 2020 research and innovation programme, led by Lindsay Bremner at the University of Westminster. The project aims to address the impacts of changing monsoon climates in three of South Asia’s rapidly growing cities through interdisciplinary design-driven inquiry. Christina’s written and cartographic work focuses on the material and neuro-structures of climate ecologies as forms of meteorological conditioning and atmospheric mattering.

Continuing her work in Southeast Asia, she remains a strategic design and research collaborator with PetaBencana.id, based in Indonesia.

As of 2020, she joins the steering committee for Materializing Data Embodying Climate Change, an AHRC funded transdisciplinary research project based at Central Saint Martins; and, is a member of the Scientific Review Committee the Curriculum for Climate Agency, to be held at Pratt Institute co-hosted by the Oslo School of Architecture, in 2021.