Your Ocean, My Ocean

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.” 

Paul Klee’s Creative Credo began: “Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” The consequence of this modernist purpose is that it rendered phenomena as abstraction.

To change our way of living, we need to understand the consequences – i.e. to make them visible. To do this we modelled the Ocean as an immense living matrix by scaling its immensity to the human experience. By animating different aspects of climate change in the Ocean we bring home the scale of the runaway phenomena impacting our planet.

The Ocean is screaming and we gave it a language by understanding it, not as a resource for human civilization, but as our client. And we as architects worked with scale and embodiment in developing a language to bridge the gap from immensity to vulnerability; from here and now to there and then.