OPEN HOUSE
2021
wood, variable
(unbuilt project, included in the Social Art Award Catalogue 2021)



OPEN HOUSE is a site-specific installation questioning the relationship between inside and outside spaces, between architecture and nature. It suggests the possibility of alternative practices of dwelling and living underwriting a more intimate, open, sustainable relationship between human beings and the natural environment.

The installation was conceived to be installed in a forest, and consists of a small wood-framed house-like structure. The structure will not be covered with any coating. The construction will be carried on in dialogue and incorporating several trees of the forest, adapting itself to the features of the landscape and the local flora. It will be built around the pre-existing natural elements without altering any aspect of the terrain or damaging any tree. Branches, bushes, and tree trunks will cross the framed structure, blurring the boundary between inside and outside and, metaphorically, between humans and nature.

OPEN HOUSE will allow visitors to ‘dis-habit’ (as opposed to in-habit) – staying temporarily in an open structure in which the living element of the environments (branches, leaves, insects, birds, sun, wind, moist, rain) will not be cut-off but embodied. Flowers in spring will grow ‘inside,’ and leaves will fall through in autumn. The natural cycle of time will pass through this permeable dwelling.

OPEN HOUSE is an imaginative and poetic invitation to reinvent human beings’ place in the world, especially at a time when a mutation in the relationship between humanity and the environment is tantamount to its future survival. OPEN HOUSE is, therefore, a ‘shelter for alternative thinking,’ a temporary space of sociability from where to start rethinking the relationship with others, with the environment, and with the landscape.