Interior Landscape: Life within the cracks of the Anthropocene challenges the white cube of modernity by including the more-than-humans who live within the cracks of the built environment into the design process – not seeing them as pests but as partners of multi-species world building.
It is now predicted that around 8% of the Earth’s surface is engulfed by modern built-up environments. The interior’s of this expansion is framed by modernity’s straight lines and white-walled aesthetic; an aesthetic that reinforces the detachment from nuanced landscapes and ecologies. At the root of this disruption are the disciplines of architecture and design; for it is through these professions that modernity’s aesthetic spreads from furniture, rooms, houses, to cities.
By critically analysing contemporary aesthetics in relation to ecology, architecture and its interior could be able to move beyond its anthropocentric origins and create a new landscape to heal the fractured relationships between humans and more-than-humans alike.
The installation was not a finished product, but rather the initiation of a process. My role as a designer was to break free the designers’ control over their objects and enable for a dialogue to take place between the designer and the more-than-human that calls this object home.
By critically analysing contemporary aesthetics in relation to ecology, architecture and its interior could be able to move beyond its anthropocentric origins and create a new landscape to heal the fractured relationships between humans and more-than-humans alike.
The installation was not a finished product, but rather the initiation of a process. My role as a designer was to break free the designers’ control over their objects and enable for a dialogue to take place between the designer and the more-than-human that calls this object home.
Research contributors
Rebecca Lewin
Rob Dunn
Julia Rijssenbeek
Angelo Renna
Meredith Root-Bernstein
References
1) Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes Michael Goldstein, Dominick DellaSala - Published June 2020
1) When the Things We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking “the Material” Anna Tsing - Published May 2019
2) Evolution of the indoor biome - NESCent Working Group on the Evolutionary Biology of the Built Environment - Published April 2015
3) biodiversity is messy: a plea for wilder cities - Marco Roos - Published October 2021.
