Open House
2021-23
wood, variable
(partially built project, included in the Social Art Award Catalogue 2021)
OPEN HOUSE is a site-specific installation that dreams of dissolving the walls between architecture and nature, between the human and the wild. It gestures toward alternative ways of dwelling — open, porous, and attuned — where the bond between people and the living world grows closer, more vital, more alive.
Set within a forest, OPEN HOUSE takes the form of a delicate wooden frame, resembling the outline of a small house. But unlike a house, it has no walls, no roof to seal it off from the world. Instead, it bends to the land and listens to the trees, weaving itself carefully among trunks and branches, never cutting, never wounding. The structure breathes with the forest, letting the landscape shape it rather than the other way around.
Branches cross its open frame, leaves flutter inside its walls, birds and insects find their way through its spaces. Here, the boundary between inside and outside disappears — and with it, the illusion that humanity stands apart from nature.
OPEN HOUSE invites visitors not to inhabit but to dis-habit — to experience a dwelling where the rhythms of life flow uninterrupted. Rain drips through, sunlight filters in, the scent of damp earth rises underfoot. Flowers will bloom ‘inside’ in spring; autumn leaves will fall unhindered to the ground. The cycles of the seasons move through the structure, uncontained and unbroken.
At a time when reimagining our relationship with the Earth has become a question of survival, OPEN HOUSE offers a poetic space of reflection. It is a "shelter for alternative thinking," a clearing where new forms of sociability, coexistence, and belonging can take root.
