The project reimagines the former Midnight Star Theatre in Homebush as the Australian Ice Museum: a civic response to escalating urban heat and unequal access to thermal comfort in Western Sydney. Rather than treat coolth as a mechanical service – out of sight and out of mind – the proposal reframes coolth as a shared public infrastructure. Through the interplay of climate, material performance, heritage adaptation and embodied experience, the project positions thermal relief as both a cultural practice and an evolving spatial condition. Informed by historian of environmental architecture Daniel Barber’s call to imagine architecture “after comfort,” this design shifts from a sealed, “climate-controlled” paradigm, toward an embodied form of architecture as environmental mediation.

The project celebrates the tangibility of temperature: hybrid passive and active systems are woven into an existing heritage fabric, restoring the perceptible relationship between the body and the climate, using architecture as the mediator. Interweaving contextual understanding, material selection and the transformative phases of ice, the building itself becomes an experiential exhibit, a spatial synthesis of climate, matter and time. The Australian Ice Museum negotiates between thermal extremes, creating layered microclimates that invite engagement.