Project Description

There is a gap between our intellectual understanding of large-scale, long-term global warming and our bodily understanding of localized, short-term heat impacts. EPHEMERAL BODIES proposes a novel approach to bridge this disparity by contending with the intersectionality of escalating heat and the societal spectacle of ‘event,’ two omnipresent phenomena of global significance. In this ideological space, fact and fiction meld to suggest an iconographic fusion for reframing architecture as climate media and to reveal architecture’s symbiotic relationship between heat and the human body.

In deploying nature as a dichotomy between its power as image and its tangibility in perception, the architecture services bodily and sensory engagements through botanical and ecological interactions. The thesis envisions a wide-spanning cultural effect as a replicable endeavor designed to disassemble, adapt, and expand to the broader green infrastructure of its host cities. By accepting heat as social, cultural, and political, the proposal aims to embody coexistence, reactivate the senses, and cultivate a mode of architectural construction that celebrates the power of plants and the ephemerality of the human body.