ECOSYSTEMIC DWELLING

Pratt Institute School of Design

Interior Design Undergraduate Senior Option Studio

[ description from syllabus ]

In both cynical and pragmatic senses, the typical New York dwelling has seldom been viewed by the typical resident as purely the domain of the human. Although most housing, workspaces, and cultural establishments in the city have been built with human-centered intentionality, a rich and complex biological network flourishes within our realm of dwelling, despite our best-intentioned attempts at demarcating hermetically-sealed boxes for the sanitized, rationalized, and essentially sterilized interior environments of ‘modern humans.’ Ranging from the unappetizing presence of ‘pest’ species such as uninvited bugs, the ubiquitous rodent population, pigeons, and summertime molds and mildews, to those that we deliberately choose to integrate into our milieu for psychological comfort, including house pets, house plants, tabletop kombucha labs, or terraria, the typical apartment contains a multitude of life of which the human is but the most explicitly-intended component.

 If approached with purpose rather than through cohabitational contingency, how could we begin to develop new environments for urban living that embrace a range of biological systems within a system of multipurpose units, in which residents may be decidedly nonhuman, and require separate yet often complimentary environmental qualities? Would these parallel systems be distinct formally, spatially, and texturally from our own, or would they interpenetrate and inform an architectural symbiosis that could benefit a number of species through their interactions? From arterial aquarium networks to vegetal furniture, feral feline fantasylands to bioelectric eel energy-harvest, your projects will speculate on the ways in which our interior world can reflect the greater diversity of our ecosystem at large, in the creation of a multi-unit dwelling in which both human and non-human can coexist. You will design an interior environment that will examine the ways in which we as humans both live and work, in contrast or in parallel to the ways and spaces in which other species perform those activities themselves.