Commissioned by The Vilcek Foundation, Log House is a sculptural birdhouse located on the institute’s rooftop terrace. The sculpture is turned from a 14” diameter, 10ft long Eastern Red Cedar log, fabricated by NYCitySlab.
Birds have an uncanny way of co-opting the infrastructures of our houses into a habitat for themselves. We are often surprised — sometimes delighted — to find them nesting under roof eaves, outside the window, or even inside the chimney. But maybe that should be unsurprising: after all, we fashion our homes from the materials of theirs19, and our cities have converted the grounds of their habitat into our own. Even within the dense urbanism of New York City, various species of birds have found sanctuaries within the pockets of parks and buildings.
This intimate confrontation of the habitats of humans and birds has precipitated another development—the emergence of a group of people deeply fascinated with observing birds. Birders, as they refer to themselves, spend time outdoors searching for rare species, or alternatively, attracting birds to their own place of residence by constructing miniature habitats often in the image of a human habitat. It is within this curious context that we were approached to design a birdhouse for a rooftop.
It is certainly not lost upon us that, to design a birdhouse in this moment of environmental crisis, requires us to confront the particular irony of building an artificial habitat for a non-human subject with the very materials harvested from their natural homes. Early on in the process, we decided that even though there was the practical need to create a functioning birdhouse dimensionally and materially spec’d to attract a local wren, swallow, or finch—that there would be a parallel ambition of using the process to gain a deeper understanding into the material ecology and supply chain of wood materials—from forestry to logging, milling to crafting—as well as continuously reminding ourselves that the building of this house is temporally and materially connected to the loss of a home elsewhere.
Location: New York, NY
Client: The Vilcek Foundation
Year: 2020
Type: Art
Size: 0.5 sf
Status: Built
Team: Figure (Artists), Robert Rising of NYCitySlab (Carpenter), James Leng and Juney Lee (Photography)
Press: Vilcek News