Designer and director Joshua A. Dawson has published his latest short film which strikes a cautionary note on the confluences of climate change, architecture, and capitalism. Titled Spa Sybarite, the three-minute-long film is set in a futuristic wellness spa in which users are offered treatments in response to the planet’s degrading environmental conditions.

Dawson’s cautionary film presents a commentary on how the climate crisis "provides a perfect excuse to make every business a climate business." Far from science fiction, the treatments offered in the film’s spa are familiar to today’s industry, including bathing complexes, IV therapy, nutrition-specific hydroponic systems, and Immersive virtual reality caves.

“Wellness is a multi-trillion-dollar industry,” Dawson told The New York Times in a recent article on his work and influences, “and it’s only a matter of time before someone takes the obvious opportunity to market wellness as the solution to climate-based illness, the biggest global health threat of our time.”

Spa Sybarite is the latest in Dawson’s growing series of films that center on speculative climate futures. The same New York Times article described how Dawson’s self-described role as a “world builder” was shaped by his early education in Bangalore, India, where he interned with the late Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi. Dawson later moved to Los Angeles, where he enrolled in the master’s program in advanced architectural studies at the University of Southern California.

To create his latest film, Dawson used a green screen stage in Burbank, Los Angeles, where live-action elements of the film’s actress were combined with CGI. The entire film was shot in a single day, while the set of the project was designed and crafted digitally over six months including a 3D model of the spa and lighting rigs.

Dawson describes his latest work as “an example of a cautionary architectural typology that is imminent,” and hopes his project will “provoke and instigate thought on the impact of climate change on health and wellness as well as their corresponding industries.”