Project implementation: USA
Project development: Austria, Latvia, USA
Our city’s future weather is not known yet. But the weather always has and will be a permanent companion in our lives.
Weather and water are intricately connected forces that shape our environment and influence life on Earth in profound ways.
The Institute of Weather Modification examines the entanglement of weather modification, hydrological engineering, and urban resilience in California. How have societies sought to manipulate atmospheric and hydrological conditions—from indigenous land practices to twentieth-century weather control experiments? What role do infrastructures of water—dams, reservoirs, desalination plants—play when paired with speculative atmospheric interventions such as cloud seeding?
The video work follows the Los Angeles Aqueduct and its extensions—reservoirs, UV treatment plants, hot springs, lakes, and cloud-seeding stations—tracing the infrastructures and landscapes that sustain the metropolis while pointing to the controversies that have shaped them.
Ultimately, the project asks what it means to build cities in dialogue with the atmosphere itself. If architecture has long been concerned with sheltering us from the elements, how might it now respond to their intensification and manipulation?
Studio Paradox
Operating between documentary and the imaginary, Julia Obleitner and Helvijs Savickis work across installation, film, and architecture. As founders of Studio Paradox, they address contemporary political, ecological, and urban conditions through a multidisciplinary lens. Their practice often engages with hidden or large-scale infrastructures, examining their ecological consequences, their role in shaping future urban trajectories, and their entanglement with collective memory. Their projects have been presented internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, the Tbilisi Biennale, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles, among others.