Project Description

the MASS EXTINCTION is a proposal speculating on the cohabitation of humans and bees in an urban housing setting. The project seeks to recontextualize the interface between the human and nonhuman at the scale of high-rise housing in Queens, NY. The human-honey bee relationship is one of great significance for the bee’s responsibility in maintaining the agricultural industry in the face of existential climate threats that have decimated global hives, colonies, and populations. The proposal examines this relationship by adopting a non-anthropocentric position, defining user profiles as fluid roles of pollinator, fertilizer, and germinator. As a result, the building is not a fixed architectural operation, but rather an organism in its own capacity of equal consequence to the human and nonhuman users, leveling the status of the three user profiles to interdependent aspects of the proposal. The human spaces are a surrounding network of interchangeable units with individual urban farming gardens that transform into human composting chambers upon death, recycling all components of the organism’s life cycle and adapting housing into not only a model of life but also of death.