Honorable Mention, 2017 BEST OF DESIGN AWARD, The Architect's Newspaper
RUNNER UP AWARD, Blank Space Fairy Tales Competition, 2018
Year: 2017
Project team: Neyran Turan (partner-in-charge), Albert Orozco, Keenan Gravier, Isabella Warren-Mohr.
Middle Earth: Dioramas for the Planet tackles the question of architectural representation in relation to climate change. The project imagines a natural history museum that contains large scale dioramas that each displays a specific problem brought by climate change taking place at the “middle of the earth,” i.e., around the equator, the earth’s zero-degree latitude: the melting of the icebergs, deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, sand mining in Singapore, and the e-waste dump sites in Ghana. Rather than limiting the role of climate change for design to a problem to solve, the project speculates on architecture as a measure against which the world might be read. While taking its cues from current environmental conditions, Middle Earth slightly abstracts and re-stages these realities with the use of the familiar artifact of diorama in order to push the limits of our public and disciplinary imagination about climate change.