Spirabilis is a speculative proposal first commissioned for the exhibition EcoRedux 2 at the Design Museum of Barcelona and further developed for the exhibition Elsewhere Envisioned at the Gallatin Labowitz Gallery at New York University in 2011. In 2014, the project was featured in the book Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel).

A form of what architectural historian Reyner Banham termed “space fiction”, pneumastudio’s inspiration for Spirabilis is Diogenes of Apollonia, ca. 5 B.C. who believed air to be the source of all being, the primal force that composed both intelligence and the soul.

Nature in the constructed environment can be a bit of a sacred cow tethered to trees, shrubs, and the rolling hill. Rather than “naturalize” the artificial, Spirabilis celebrates artificiality while harnessing the elemental means of sustaining life in a total ecological living system.

In this sense the project finds affinity with Bruno Latour’s concept of nature as a plural condition capable of many forms and conditions; a “building” and thus not a “landscape” that nonetheless functions as much like the latter as it does the former, while also producing a variety of material, formal and spatial characteristics situated somewhere between the two.

Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014): https://prestelpublishing.randomhouse.de/book/Global-Design/Peder-Anker/Prestel-com/e455923.rhd

Interview with the curators of EcoRedux 2: https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2011/03/30/ecoredux-02-design-manuals-for-a-dying-planet.html