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Imagination Takes Flight

What can you learn from the birds? Sixty architects, designers and artists find out.

Mark McMenamin -- Interior Design, 6/23/2008 12:00:00 AM

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There’s nothing especially novel about designing models for future environments. Unless, of course, the concept’s for the birds. The Birdhouse Project, a nonprofit in Osaka, Japan, invites architects, designers, and artists—Tadao Ando, Norman Foster, and Daniel Libeskind among them—to envision structures via models built to sparrow scale. The final works are shown at biennial exhibits, the most recent being the Hampyeong World Butterfly & Insect Expo in South Korea. The show then travels to Tokyo in July and Shanghai in October. In each city, the designers lecture at local schools and help students craft their own submissions. It’s all part of a mission to promote environmental protection, specifically the peaceful coexistence of nature with man-made development.

The 60 designers who’ve participated in the Birdhouse Project so far have been selected partly based on their area of specialization: museums, cars, etc. Which genre can we expect in 2010? “I’m planning birdhouses designed by movie directors,” president Hiroki Yoshino says. Watch eco-futurism go Hollywood.

To view a selection of birdhouses currently included in the project’s collection, click to start the slide show above.

For more information on The Birdhouse Project, visit birdhouse.gr.jp.