La bande dessinée en France à la Belle époque. 1880–1914

retical insights—not supplementary, not explicatory, but parallel strands of visual arguments, points of tension and intensity. Such diagramimages are operational in the sense of not depicting a stable reality but becomings involved in the surfacing of dynamic spatialization: We speak of space but in the trajectories and potentials of its transformation. On the surface of the diagram, a plethora of earth forces emerge as they carve out a space of problematics. As the authors write, “Each model considers a specific question, a problem that it unfolds in space, sometimes in time, using a borrowed and inflected archetypal figure: the globe is turned inside out like a glove, the grid of coordinates of Euclidian geometry deforms and evolves depending on the actors who cross its space, while the division of urban time bends into spirals of space-time” (p. 17). Variation becomes primary, fixity an aftereffect, implying how the authors try to move beyond the subject-object freeze-frames to a more ecological dynamic, asking thus also what this ecological dynamic means for architecture, design, and visual composition of such worlds— or more accurately, in such worlds. The book functions as a very convenient manual, useful for teaching and the already voiced connection between theory and design. It prompts consideration of other locations, other situations, other geographies that could be modeled in this vein. In a manner like some other (speculative) designers such as Design Earth (for example, their Geostories book and various exhibition projects), Terra Forma’s pedagogically useful and discursively interesting take resonates with several educational and research-driven design approaches of recent years. Here, the most obvious to mention is the Terraforming program that ran at the Strelka Institute (2022), as well as the Politics of Atmospheres studio by Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng that ran for three years within the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art and was also invited to participate in the Critical Zones project led by Latour and Peter Weibel. Now translated into English a couple of years after the original French edition, Terra Forma is a great reference point for particular kinds of environmental humanities that work with architectural and design methods. It also establishes further bridges in this sort of an expanded humanities alongside questions of experimental practices of “data visualization.”