Radical Habitat

Type | Garden

Year | 2025

Project site | Schiehaven, Rotterdam

Client | Architecture Instituut Rotterdam

The Radical Habitat is a garden pavilion commissioned for the Rotterdam Architecture Month 2025. The project is designed as a space for birds, plants, and humans to cohabitate together. The installation follows a logic of immediate reuse, with a material supply chain of 200m. Inspired by the way ruins—originally built for human purposes—gradually transform into technogenic ecosystems, Radical Habitat challenges the fantasy of nature as something pure, pristine, and separate from us. Ruins reveal that nature does not exist only in untouched wilderness; it emerges equally through the entanglement of human and non-human forces. There is no original innocence to return to, no clear boundary between what is natural and what is artificial and so theRadical Habitat explores how structures created today might become scaffolds for wildlife, and triggers of biodiversity. The result is an "instant ruin": a space that blurs the lines between building, garden, nest, and dwelling. In this entangled ecology, the architecture supports natural life: bird perches are shaped like columns with nests as their capitals—or perhaps, from the bird’s perspective, their perches and nests become supports for human life; weren’t our columns originally trees and branches?