Winner (First Prize), 2018 BEST OF DESIGN AWARD, The Architect's Newspaper
Year: 2018
Project team: Neyran Turan, Terry Hlaing, Charlotte Chan, Jonah Merris.
Fake Earths: A Planetary Theater Play positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural environmental imagination. The project portrays a theater play, which is taking place at a post-Anthropocene era, in which the idea of “nature” belongs to us, the ancient humans. The theater play is about five specific sites on Earth, whose purpose and appearance are de-coupled because of the nature of the activities that they contain. For instance, a scene of the play takes place at the Potemkin Village, the infamous data center and e-waste dump site in Africa. The site was designed to read as a city from above yet its oblique reading is fake as it mischievously hides its architectural content. Other scenes of the play are the asteroid mining clearing sites, Grand Tour of spoil tips, Pacific Ocean trash mountains, and the Wonder Zoo, which contains simulated environments of the endangered species on Earth. As the theater play stages these landscapes, it re-assembles their fake imagery and content while allowing for new stories to unfold.