Down to Earth is a book about designing in times of climate crisis and is the concluding project of DOWN TO EARTH, the antitypical 9th edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam in which the chief curator George Brugmans – with the world in lock-down – turned the traditional biennale model inside out and focused on completely unfolding the Biennale’s own research on how to use the energy transition and water issue as leverage to find real world solutions to help realise the world community’s sustainable development goals.

In the first part of this visually rich book (titled How can we land?) Brugmans reports on this research, anchoring it in the history of the IABR as a cultural research institute aimed at real change, and describing the exhibited results. This also makes the book a retrospective catalogue of a series of seven smaller exhibitions that were organized across a year and in different locations from September 2020, as the pandemic permitted..

In the second part (Where Can We Land?), including an essay by Dirk Sijmons and an account of a conversation between teachers and students at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design, George Brugmans reflects on our complex presence in the Anthropocene, argues for a new art policy as a condition for a truly free creative space, and makes suggestions to designers and imaginers on how to take a stand now that the endgame is the human condition.

Nai010 Publishers, 432pp, 17cm x 24cm, illustrated paperback, Dutch/Eng text, 2023