Surreal Architecture to Tackle the World's Environmental Crises

A hollowed-out mountain brimming with rapacious microorganisms that digest electronic waste. An iceberg from Antarctica chilling in a Persian Gulf port, providing cool, clean drinking water to the populace.

These are some of the dreamlike projects in “Geostories,” a new exhibit at New York’s Cooper Union exploring speculative solutions to planetary woes like climate change, pollution, and deep-seas mining. Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, architectural specialists at MIT, have stocked the show with selections from their “Design Earth” series, which posits large-scale environmental interventions that reference visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and Étienne-Louis Boullée.