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Due to tightened coronavirus rules, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Sonneveld House will be closed until at least 15 March. See our online programme.

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From parrot perch to systems theory

Animal Encounters

A spatial installation by Studio Ossidiana explores how architecture might mediate between all sorts of creatures, making room for a variety of encounters and setting the stage for interactions between humans and non-humans. The installation is an environment occupied by drawings, diagrams and architectural models – creature-like objects – that address issues of proximity, scale and cross-species politics.

Animal Encounters. Photo Johannes Schwartz.
date
13/10/2019
through
02/02/2020
 
 
location

Het Nieuwe Instituut
Museumpark 25
3015 CB Rotterdam

 

Through the display of a series of emblematic projects, various relationships between the human and non-human world are made tangible. The installation is based on Giovanni Bellotti’s prior thesis research on bird habitats and bird cages (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018), and on Studio Ossidiana’s current creative residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

Also occupying this environment is an archive selection centred around the educational vision of architect Aldo van Eyck. It includes a student project for an aquarium by Jan Verhoeven and a hippopotamus shelter by Joost Váhl. These structuralist approaches to animal architecture propose a relational and ecological understanding of the animal-human encounter.

Further expanding on ecology and systems theory is the intervention by Evangelos Kotsioris, assistant curator at MoMA. Kotsioris will be a visiting scholar in November and will present his research on cybernetics, computerization and architecture during a public seminar.

Animal Encounters is the successor to Habitat: Expanding Architecture, and part of the Total Space project.

Image: Giovanni Bellotti / Studio Ossidiana
Animal Encounters. Image: Giovanni Bellotti / Studio Ossidiana

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Habitat: Expanding Architecture. Photo Johannes Schwartz.

Habitat: Expanding Architecture

Habitat: Expanding Architecture is a research installation which captures a key moment in the history of architecture and urban planning: the tenth CIAM conference at Dubrovnik in 1956. Here the concept 'habitat' was a central theme: a broader understanding of architecture through a new ecological approach viewing architecture less as an autonomous discipline than as part of larger, dynamic whole. Habitat is the first in a series of Total Space programme installations.

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