Document Type
Article
Date
6-2025
Keywords
climate change, extraction, geoengineering, Salton Sea, solar radiation, management
Language
English
Disciplines
Architectural Engineering | Architecture | Environmental Design
Description/Abstract
“Geoengineering” is increasingly seen as the best, perhaps even last, hope in the fight against global warming. Calls for such practices as Solar Radiation Management are becoming urgent as the effects of the climate crisis make themselves visible. This essay uses California’s Salton Sea, a geo-engineered palimpsest of once natural terrain turned toxic and inhospitable through human intervention, as a case study against the illusion of control. Through the critical lens of Magical Realism and the visual language of the architecture studio, this essay calls into question the desire to exert human control over natural systems, illustrating that the unintended consequences of such efforts will only serve to compound the problems they were initially meant to resolve.
Recommended Citation
Newsom, Hannibal, "Rain, Rain, Go Away: Geoengineering and the Illusion of Control" (2025). School of Architecture - All Scholarship. 252.
https://surface.syr.edu/arc/252
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
