Plan B Architecture & Urbanism

The world is perforated by uncharted territory whose mysteries upend our claim to omniscience. The World Turned Inside Out cracks open the world, the one we think we know. It delineates a global project of unknowing. A modern reawakening of geographical mythologies of the unknown might conjure a new relationship between humans and the earth. The result is not the erasure of knowns but the reveal of other possibilities located somewhere between reality and speculation. As a species, we have transformed the entire earth into the City of Seven Billion. To navigate and search this city, humans have set forth a magnificent inscription of highways, railroads, shipping lanes, submarine cables, vaporous contrails, and orbital paths. It encompasses and overwhelms the planet. The World Turned Inside Out calls for an unexploring of the earth. It mobilizes practices of redacting, rewilding, and otherwise unclaiming the known. These can give way to phantom geographies and the wisdom of uncertainty. The time has come for a mandate of abandonment and forgetting, an epoch of great deceleration. Let’s scour the world to engineer emptiness and celebrate omissions. If one turns the world inside out, what will be unearthed?

Yale School of Architecture
Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown
Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale

Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis with Robert Cannavino
Research and Design: Gustav Nielsen, Diana Smiljkovic with Claire Gorman, Rachel LeFevre, Page Comeaux assisted by: Bobby Chun, Josh Greene, Claire Hicks, Max Ouellette-Howitz, Ingrid Pelletier, Noah Sannes, Rhea Schmid, Christine Song, Maya Sorabjee, Paul Wu, Christina Zhang
Fabrication: Jack Rusk with Adare Brown, Christopher Cambio and Tyler Krebs Cosmic
Map in Consultation with: Priyamvada Natarajan