Aerial views have often inspired architecture projects and fashion collections. The contemporary history of fashion has for example seen collections integrating aerial images of landscapes, urban conglomerates or photographs taken from the NASA archives.
Yet aerial images can be used for something more important than prints for garments and accessories. They can indeed be employed to study climate change and raise awareness about key priorities for international climate action.
That's exactly what the exhibition "Mind the Earth", launching next week at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, will be doing.
The event incorporates satellite images accompanied by texts focusing on the challenges, dilemmas, and international best practices to accelerate and influence the debates needed on all levels of society regarding the way the planet's finite resources are employed.
"Mind the Earth" was conceived by the Danish artist Kasper Brejnholt Bak, who is specialised in urban planning and has developed sustainable urban development projects in more than 10 countries.
While working on major urban planning projects, Bak was fascinated by Google Earth as a tool to understand and analyze the ways in which we settle and use the planet's resources.
Four years ago Bak launched a first "Mind the Earth" exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center and more events followed along the same line. Yet exhibiting the project at the UN Headquarters is a unique possibility: it is estimated that visitors may reach 150,000 people in the six weeks the images of urban conglomerates, deserts, forests and vast expanses of sea will be on display.
In 1935, Le Corbusier published Aircraft (Download LeCorbusier_AIRCRAFT) in which he stated he was grateful for the architectural lesson the aerial view gave him. The images forming the corpus of "Mind the Earth" are extremely inspiring for their colours, geometries and shapes and they provide us with unique bird's eye views, but they also carry a message and call us all to individual action on climate change.
"Mind the Earth" is at the UN Headquarter, 405 East 42nd Street, New York, NY, from 18th October to 1st December 2019