Radical Habitat

Type | Garden    Year | 2025    Project site | Rotterdam, Netherlands

Client | Architecture Instituut Rotterdam

The Radical Habitat is a garden pavilion commissioned by 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 the Radical 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 building, garden, nest, and dwelling. Columns become bird perches, their nests the new capitals, or perhaps, from the bird’s view, their perches are what support us. After all, weren’t our columns once trees?

Radical Habitat is a bird garden imagined not as a monument, but as an offering. Echoing the spatiality of Romanesque cathedrals, Babylonian gardens, and monastic cloisters, it transforms the idea of the enclosed garden into a porous, fragmented space, inviting spiritual and ecological coexistence through interdependence, rather than dominance.