Breaking Habits

Reflecting on our sedentary society, RAAAF imagined a possible future where all chairs and sofas will be replaced by more body-friendly pieces of furniture.

Just like offices and the rest of our sedentary society, living rooms are filled with chairs, even though medical research has shown that sitting too much is unhealthy. With Breaking Habits RAAAF explores how a world without chairs and couches could look like in 2025. 

RAAAF, Breaking Habits, 2017. Photo Johannes Schwartz
RAAAF, Breaking Habits, 2017. Photo Johannes Schwartz
RAAAF, Breaking Habits, 2017. Photo Johannes Schwartz
RAAAF, Breaking Habits, 2017. Photo Frederica Rijkenberg
RAAAF, Breaking Habits, 2017. Photo Frederica Rijkenberg

  At the crossroads of visual art, architecture and philosophy, Breaking Habits is a new spatial installation by RAAAF, commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund for the visual arts. It is an experimental landscape inside a classic Dutch canal house, that breaks with entrenched living habits. This physical thinking model materializes a philosophical worldview and makes it tangible: a diagonal landscape of affordances scaffolds a more active lifestyle by inviting to change positions and explore new diagonal standing postures. 

RAAAF, Breaking Habits, 2017. Photo Johannes Schwartz

The research for Breaking Habits was supported by an ERC Starting Grant and a VIDI-Grant by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for Erik Rietveld’s philosophical project The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied Mind. An earlier installation in research project was The End of Sitting by RAAAF and Barbara Visser.

RAAAF, Breaking Habits, 2017. Photo Frederica Rijkenberg


Breaking Habits, Amsterdam
Design: RAAAF – Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances
Team: Ronald & Erik Rietveld, David Habets, Cecile-Diama Samb
Client: Mondriaan Fonds
Execution: Schaart Adventures, Koos Schaart & Koen van Oort
Completion: 2017