Looking out over the society today encompassed with deluge of information and effervescence of progressive technology growing in paralel, discrete buildings are no more the paramount elements of it but communication is.  One of ultimate role of architects as a profession may be to disclose or constellate the societal demand itself, therefore an opportunity for history itself, and not to merely respond the existing one referencing history in the past.  The naive interdependence of architects and buildings is yet to be dubious.  The more architects try to conscientiously make “good” buildings for the society, the more the ontology of architecture cynically recedes.  The role of architect would be unconsciously nestling on the realm of mere service, recoiling in motion and commotion, cyles and shifts, ebbs and  flow, hectically witnessed today.

The work explores this contemporary pathology of architecture re-examining its definition, elements, context, and the role of architects today.  Focusing on one of the most influential trans-societal/cultural issues in anthropocene, the global warming, They are re-composed as an alternative architectural syntax.

As opposed to our optimistic understanding regarding the issue, Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost habitat for human being, has been emerged as a ground zero of global warming today.  Proceding numerouns metropolises on the globe which are causing it, the effect has been exposed as the critical crisis disconnecting the delicate relationship of the landscape phenomena and the inupiat cultural implications around them. Therein one of the inupiat fundamental tenet performs ; modestly adapt to the nature with respect, never modify, resist or insist.  Despite the fact that the source of the transition is non-natural.

Responding this context of perception gap along the subject, a private exhibition showcasing lost landscape phenomena in Barrow is held at London in 2045.  After they had been lost, series of on-site real scale lost phenomena recreations were set up in Barrow to artificially preserve them, the phenomenal preservation.  Contrasting as the urban counterparts, they are also translated and archived as scaled dioramas for the remote audiences in London and travelling to other cities being guilty through their carbon dioxide emmision, the mobile preservation.

Three lost landscape phenomena ; sea smoke, snow blindness and ice terminology are recreated by the dioramas.  All are inextricable to inupiat life and hunting culture.  Through the translation of the unknown natural phenomena of the far north hinterland to metropolis city-dwellers, the original lost phenomena are reconfigured and rearticulated through contemporary technological / material lexicon, into human scale performative artifacts, the exhibit scale in city context.

Whereas the another series of exibits, the lost phenomena recreations in full scale, are constructed in Barrow’s landscape.  Here the only audiences visited the city exhibition are allowed to access the lost phenomenal scenography in the veritable venue.  However, after long flights involving some changes to Barrow, what visitors witnessed there was the genuine sea smoke itself.  Lateral arcitc stratus majestically hovering the lowest in the sky.  The blue on the bottom reflecting shimmer of open water over the horizon.  No recreations and none even knows about the existence of the exhibition.  What visitors witnessed was the inupiat consistently engaging their life as it is.

In contrast to the conventional theater which recreates past history on steady stages, the work addresses the possiblity of theatre, the ultimate communicative oscilator of time and space, superimposed upon the reality.  The unanticipated collision of fiction and actuality evokes traumatic criticism to the reality and hence leads the audiences to imagine yet unseen tomorrow.