Commendation RIBA Award for Sustainable Design
The Sakha Republic sits atop continuous permafrost; its thaw risks releasing billions of tons of methane and CO2 into the warming atmosphere. This project makes two local festival traditions - the Ohuokhai circle dance and the Labour Day parade - operative in challenging the hegemony of extractive and military logics in understanding and managing the region’s frozen soilscape. Three interventions into the region’s festival infrastructure channel radical uncertainty about permafrost thaw into engaging in the loss of one world, while singing another into existence.
A network of serge sensors is deployed across the intersections of seismic profiling gridlines with alaas meadows. Sakha horse-hitching posts are hybridised with temperature boreholes and methane sensors, forming interfaces with a permafrost data commons.
Yakutsk’s heating pipeline is raised, creating a new parade route along religiously-futureproofed infrastructure. Piles recycle thaw-demolition waste, their integrated thermobraids displaying live permafrost changes to paraders each year.
Yakutsk’s parade axis is extended into Lena's floodplain, towards a new Ohuokhai dancing square. Floodwater circulates through the gabion base, filled with reclaimed demolition brick, supporting a semi-hardscaped heave-friendly surface. Seasonal use re-frames flooding as a life- giving rather than destructive force, seeking to inhabit waterlogged permafrost landscapes rather than filling them in.
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