PIVNIK, Lee
Symbiotic House
Symbiotic House is a project catalyzed by Lee Pivnik in 2022 to research and develop adaptive architectural solutions to Miami’s environmental precarity, and to conceptualize and design a “multi-use space for multi-species survival”. The project’s aim is to reimagine the home as a potential site for climate care, an active hub for offsetting carbon emissions, rewilding landscape, supporting biodiversity, and adapting to environmental change. Symbiotic House will ultimately manifest as a living earthwork that functions as a regenerative shelter and center for interdisciplinary art and ecology research in South Dade.
The project intends to broaden the design process so that the space emerges organically through communal workshops, open research, and constant feedback. It is meant to invite the local community of South Florida into a collective act of dreaming up new practices for how to best adapt to the intersecting climate and housing crises, so that the people living at the epicenter of these issues are treated as the experts in mitigating them.
Leading climate anthropologist Anna Tsing defines precarity as “the condition of being vulnerable to others.” Embracing precarity can make different ways of living possible, lifeways that are more visibly entangled with natural systems and other species. This project aims to enact a mutualistic relationship between the built and natural environment, through the creation of a structure that is adaptable to Florida’s changing climate, and net positive, designed to follow the rigid guidelines of the Living Building Challenge.
Following in the legacy of other prototype “House of the Future” projects and Florida roadside tourist attractions, Symbiotic House will embody a shift towards building in a way that benefits the environment, while functioning as a cultural center and artist residency so that it can inspire more widespread transformation towards regenerative design.
Two years of open and collaborative research will culminate in the construction of a dual-function habitable shelter and art and ecology center in the Redlands, Miami-Dade’s agricultural area. Consultants from local businesses and non-profits will be engaged to help craft a multi-use business model for Habitat so the project can be not only environmentally sustainable but also economically viable.
Published by Symbiotic House, 2022
Architecture / Digital
