The Habitable Skin - Opening

Originally conceptualized for the Venice Biennale 2027 in collaboration with Professor Ellen Braae and PhD fellow Taryn Humphrey, the exhibition examines an architectural language of cohabitation between humans and more-than-human species.

On the evening of the opening, Studio Coquille and TERROIR will guide visitors through the outdoor "Insect Bridge"—a structure built specifically for the exhibition. Following the tour, enjoy a talk exploring the theoretical ideas behind a city designed for multiple kinds of life forms.

About the Exhibition

The Habitable Skin is an exhibition that reimagines the boundary as architecture’s most critical ecological Nexus. Not as a line of separation, but as a space of interaction. It asks what it would mean for the skin to be habitable - not only for humans, but for other forms of life? To create a skin that lets in rain, sound, light, breath—offering space for nesting, rooting, and coexisting?

With a natural bridge for insects linking green spaces in the urban fabric, and mushrooms cultivated indoors, Habitable Skin asks how we might design with space and time, instead of against them. The exhibition shows how façades, walls, roofs, and floors can become shared surfaces—porous, responsive, and alive - while reminding us how we are already living with and among other species. Habitable Skin is a living architectural experiment creating interactions and knowledge as species live together.

In this space, coexistence is no longer a condition. It is a design principle. A responsibility. And a possibility. To rethink the skin is to rethink the role of architecture itself: not as a shelter from the world, but as a structure within it—situated, sensory, and capable of coexistence.

🍷 There will be drinks