Architecture and environmental history meet in a tiny apartment installation to show the environmental impact of our homes and to find new ways of engaging with our living spaces.

How Heavy is a City? This question instigates a three-year research project into the complex set of transformations of both the city and its backdrop, revealing a new figure in the making with a magnitude of planetary dimensions. To make sense of these transformations and sort out the underlying agencies, a re-assembly of architecture and what it means to build a collective environment is required. 

In times of the Anthropocene when humanity has become a geological force shaping the planet, we urgently need new ways of thinking about the spaces we live in. This project scales down the Anthropocene to a level that every one of us can relate to: a single apartment.

“The Anthropocene Apartment” draws on environmental history to analyse and show the exhibition space’s own ecological footprint: the materials it consumes, the environments both near and far it exploits, the energy used to build it that still slumbers within its walls. It employs architecture to suggest new and less disruptive ways of designing our homes and engaging with the world around us.