Next Habitat

# 114 Students speculate on future living scenarios in an exhibition by the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam on view at Ventura Lambrate during Milan Design Week. #salone2015

“Next Habitat”, the exhibition organised by the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, presents new work by international designers from the Master of Interior Architecture & Retail Design [MIARD] programme.

“Next Habitat” presents visions of future habitation, holistic systems and artifacts. Collectively, the designers form a speculative scenario for living, addressing our relationship with resource, disposal, information, energy, light and life.

Either to adapt to cultural, environmental and technological changes, to cope with financial, social or political crisis, to hunt for basic necessities such as water and food, or simply yearn for a different place and community to live in – historically, humans have developed strategies to invent and modify their surroundings i.e. their habitat.

Radio Killed The Electric Star, Alice Bonicelli & Lorena Rubio Toledo

These habitats distinguished themselves through a porous and linked “localize nature” of entities working together. Today, the majority of our built environment and its objects are static, wasteful, and disconnected to their immediate ecologies and local resources. The projects presented, explore and redefine interrelated elements of the spaces we inhabit – through the speculation and production of how we might live, more intelligently, ingeniously, and by thinking with systems rather than objects as an end in itself.

Centered on the concept of “systems for the habitat,” the premise looks at connective networks to form new spatial synergies. Each proposal confronts and reimagines a pressing topic in contemporary culture.