Project description and rationale

Bradbaori is a speculative architectural intervention and a thought experiment that attempts to repair the watershed in Los Angeles by reimagining the city’s famed landmark – the Bradbury Building – as a stepwell or baori. As climate change accelerates, Los Angeles is increasingly experiencing extreme swings between drought and heavy rainfall, a phenomenon scientists describe as hydroclimate whiplash (Lin II, Reference Lin II2025). Intense storms follow periods of prolonged dryness, causing flood warnings and wildfire seasons. Yet much of this sudden influx of rainwater is lost as runoff, rushing through urban channels and out into the Pacific without being captured. The future of water access in Los Angeles is therefore directly tied to reconciling this drought-and-deluge cycle. Building resilience against hydroclimate whiplash requires rethinking how large-scale engineering and infrastructure projects engage the city’s watershed, shifting from reactive flood control measures like the concretization of the LA River, toward systems that can absorb, store and steward water during moments of excess. Represented through a short film, Bradbaori is a worldbuilding research project that explores ways to build resilience.

For centuries, stepwells, or baoris, across South Asia functioned as climate-adaptive water infrastructures designed to capture monsoon rainfall and recharge groundwater during dry seasons (Lautman, Reference Lautman2017). More than reservoirs, they operated as shared social spaces where water access, maintenance and governance were collectively negotiated by slowing water, holding it within the ground and embedding stewardship into everyday use (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The Chand Baori Stepwell, Abhaneri, India (left), and the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles (center). Diagrammatic breakdown of the intervention and the microcosm of the Bradbaori’s systems (right).

The Bradbury Building (Figure 1) in Los Angeles is both an architectural landmark and a movie star – a recurring character in film noir such as D.O.A. (Maté Reference Maté1950) and science fiction like Blade Runner (Scott Reference Scott1982). Situated at the center of downtown LA and the city’s fraught water politics, the building has long anchored the collective imagination of a future Los Angeles. But where Blade Runner cast it against a Neo-Tokyo-inspired, neon-drenched LA skyline, this project imagines something different: the Bradbury Building reaches into the past to address contemporary water infrastructure issues for our cities.

This combination of Bradbury and baori forms the Bradbaori – a hydrological urban experiment that uses ancestral hydrological knowledge to ask how traditional wisdom could hold the key to a more sustainable future for contemporary cities (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Glyph language diagram that spells “Jala,” Sectional views of the Bradbaori (left); Production shoot of the short film (center); Bradbaori film stills and its characters that represent the earth–energy–water nexus (right).

Outcomes and future perspectives

Within the process of worldbuilding, a single storyline is often understood as a slice of the world or a piece of design fiction (McDowell Reference McDowell2017). The slice of the world of Bradbaori is represented through a short film where the characters within this world, or the Baorians, as I call them, are a personification of the systems within the Bradbaori (Figure 2). If the Bradbaori is a microcosm of the city of Los Angeles, then the Baorians represent its infrastructure. The Baorians make visible the otherwise abstract systems of water governance, translating technical processes into legible social and political relationships. The world of the Bradbaori also has its own written language that is derived from the glyphs of the Bradbury Building, built for the purposes of communication, creation and control of its systems, and is reflected in the costumes and interfaces (Figure 2). These costumes are both inherent in representing the specificity of the fictional culture of the Bradbaori as well as its utilitarian purpose. The narrative of the short film follows the characters as they perform a ritual that activates the Bradbaori’s machine systems. Their gestures blur the boundary between ceremony and technology, fusing infrastructure with ritual. Bradbaori aims to reimagine policy as poetry and regulation as a ritual (Figure 2).

Bradbaori will be officially announced at the 2026 DEMO Festival at the New Museum through a track talk, with subsequent future presentations and screenings, including an exhibition of the worldbuilding assets hosted by Climate House US, and a future immersive mixed reality experience at the Bradbury Building itself – returning the work to the very site that inspired it. Other outputs and representations of the world of Bradbaori include a feature-film screenplay and a zine that serves as the project’s worldbuilding codex.