Housing the Human

Are modular building units and cloud housing the right answer to the needs of nomadic lifestyles? Can we harvest construction materials from food waste that are efficient and at the same time aesthetically appealing? What image is used to teach artificial intelligence what a human is?

The international platform Housing the Human addresses these and other social and aesthetic questions that impact the future of communal living. From a pool of concepts submitted by architects, designers, and artists, five approaches were chosen to be developed into concrete prototypes over the coming year. On Saturday, October 13, these projects will be presented to the public for the first time during the Forecast Festival at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. 

Dasha Tsapenko (Ukraine, Netherlands) explores how future uses of living space might shapeshift through changes in our family constellations and love relationships, such as polyamorous partnerships. Tsapenko bases the project LOVARATORY on her personal fieldwork in 20 households. Artem Kitaev (Russia, Switzerland, US) of KOSMOS Architects is developing the prototype Three Pillars of A New Home and shows how temporary housing can be created expeditiously from abandoned and unused structures by using transportable elements. Lucia Tahan (Spain, Germany) presents her project Cloud Housing, for which she investigates how the two variants of hosting space—the digital and the physical—can be linked. Simone C Niquille (Switzerland, Netherlands) of Technoflesh presents the initial results of her video investigations on human and machine cohabitation, taking the perspective of an artificially intelligent entity. Mae-Ling Lokko (Ghana, Philippines, US) is considered an expert for sustainable material technology; with her project Agrocologies she investigates methods for processing and reusing organic waste for building purposes and how it can be integrated into household recycling management. 

Visitors are offered insights into the proposed concepts through installations and presentations followed by open discussions. A team of experts that will consult the development of the prototypes and spice up the discussion at HKW includes Tulga Beyerle, Omer Fast, Daniel Perlin, Angela Rui, Matthias Sauerbruch, and James Taylor-Foster.

Housing the Human is an initiative of the artistic directors of international art, design, and architecture festivals that will also function as further stations of presentations of the interim results: Freo Majer (Forecast, Berlin, October 13, 2018), Jan Boelen (4th Istanbul Design Biennial, November 2, 2018 and Z33/House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium, August 2019), Josephine Michau (Copenhagen Architecture Festival CAFx, April 2019), and Pippo Ciorra (Demanio Marittimo. Km-278, Ancona, Italy). Final project results will be presented in October 2019 as part of the Housing the Human Festival in Berlin.

About the experts:

Tulga Beyerle is a design curator and museum director. She has led the Museum of the Dresden Museum of Applied Arts, Dresden State Art Collection since 2014, and will become director of MKG Hamburg on December 1. She has curated exhibitions across Europe and published widely on art and design. Beyerle is engaged in the fluid and disruptive aspects of the design process. She is particularly interested in experimental, speculative, and social design.

Omer Fast is an artist and filmmaker whose work spans the mediums of moving image and installation and incorporates both fictional and documentary material. The focus of his nonlinear explorations is often on what the artist calls “liminal figures,” individuals whose life experience or work takes them across both real and symbolic borders. Soldiers, migrants, morticians, and adult film performers appear in Fast’s work as messengers from invisible or taboo realms, describing realities few of us would ever experience.

Daniel Perlin is a graduate of Brown’s Modern Culture and Media department, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the Whitney Independent Study program. He is the founder of Make_Good, an experience design studio dedicated to bettering lives and the planet. Recent collaborations as a designer include work with Google, IBM, Under Armour, Vito Acconci, Maya Lin, Errol Morris, the Venice Biennial of Architecture, the Cooper Hewitt Museum and Domus magazine. He also recently created VR and MR experiences for The Seoul Biennial of Architecture, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Fake Love. Besides his design practice, Perlin is currently a mentor in residence at New Inc., the New Museum’s incubator in New York. In the past, he has taught as an adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP and Magnet programs, RISD’s department of Graphic Design and at Products of Design at SVA in New York. 

Angela Rui is a curator and writer working in design theory and criticism. She cocurated the 25th Design Biennial of Ljubljana. She previously curated the 2015 edition of Operae, the independent design festival in Turin, and the exhibition Ugo la Pietra. Disequilibrating Design at the Triennale Design Museum in 2014. She is currently involved in the upcoming program Neuhaus, supported by Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and is cocurating the Dutch participation at the TXII – Broken Nature (Milan, 2019). She teaches social design at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Matthias Sauerbruch is a founding partner of Sauerbruch Hutton, an agency for architecture, urbanism. He has held professorships at the Technische Universität Berlin and Stuttgart Akademie der Bildenden Künste and was a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design as well as at Universität der Künste Berlin. He is a founding member of the German Sustainable Building Council, a commissioner of the Munich Committee for Urban Design and part of the Executive Board of KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin. Sauerbruch is an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and director of the Architecture Section of the Berlin Akademie der Künste.

James Taylor-Foster is curator of contemporary architecture and design at ArkDes, Sweden. In 2016 he cocurated the Nordic Pavilion at the 15thArchitecture Biennale in Venice; in 2018 he participated in the central exhibition at the biennial’s 16thedition. A writer and editor with bylines at ArchDaily, Metropolis, PIN–UP, Domus, Volume, Monocle, Mousse, Disegno, and Real Review, he is a regular voice on Monocle 24 radio. He is a course coordinator for the European Cultural Academy in Venice and has been a visiting critic or lecturer in architecture at universities across the US and Europe. He currently sits on the advisory board of the Future Architecture Platform.

Housing the Human is supported by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development within the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning of Germany, and held in collaboration with acatech.