Project Speciation
European Cultural Center 
Venice, Italy 2021

For the exhibit -Space Time Existence- during the Venice Biennale 2021,  e+i studio presents ‘project speciation’ , an installation that emerges from an effort to speciate past projects as a mode of self-reflection on our work and an acknowledgement that every architectural project designed to house humans must reckon with the ecologies that it replaces. The conceptual framework for the proposal is visualized in the graphic timeline that explores connections between animal extinctions and architectural typologies. The work is motivated by an interest in understanding how we arrived at this condition, where the built environment has played a major role in the loss of biodiversity that continues to push animals towards extinction. We ask how the built environment can adopt a multi-species approach and acknowledge the histories and biases embedded within certain building typologies that have privileged a very narrow conception of ‘the human’. Departing from a human-centric account of matter, the work aims to understand architecture within an ethical framework that takes into account the ‘more-than-human’ world. 

PROJECT DATA
Design: Eva Perez de Vega + Ian Gordon, with Ziyu Chen & Susana Chinchilla
Client: European Cultural Center

Onsite Interview: