Breaking Habits - Exploring the World of Affordances
Breaking Habits is a spatial installation at the crossroads of visual art, architecture and philosophy. The art installation by RAAAF is commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund for the visual arts. This experimental landscape inside a classic Amsterdam canal house breaks with entrenched living habits.
Our environment is almost entirely designed for sitting, while medical research has shown that prolonged sitting is unhealthy. As the installation is used daily in various ways by the Fund’s staff, RAAAF explores with Breaking Habits how a world without chairs or benches could look like; the living environment of the future.
This physical thinking model materializes a philosophical worldview and makes it tangible: a diagonal landscape of affordances scaffolds a more active lifestyle by inviting continuous shifts in bodily posture throughout the day.
Will diagonal living become the new norm?
The research for Breaking Habits was supported by an ERC Starting Grant and a VIDI-Grant by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for Erik Rietveld’s philosophical project ‘The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied Mind’. An earlier installation in research project was ‘The End of Sitting’ by RAAAF | Barbara Visser.
Data
Client: Mondriaan Fonds
Art installation: RAAAF
Team: Ronald & Erik Rietveld, David Habets, Cecile-Diama Samb, Joop Schroën
Craftsmanship: Schaart Adventures, Koos Schaart & Koen van Oort
Photography: Johannes Schwartz (color), Frederica Rijkenberg (black & white)
Location: Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdam
Status: Realised, 2017
Reviews
— Archdaily
"RAAAF is Breaking Habits With a Vision of a Home Without Chairs."
— DOMUS
"Reflecting on our sedentary society, RAAAF imagined a possible future where all chairs and sofas will be replaced by more body-friendly pieces of furniture."
— Designboom
"RAAAF's 'breaking habits' installation explores the future of domestic interiors"
— FastCompany
"Working together, Erik and Ronald have taken the idea of affordances and applied it to the prospect of a chair-less and table-less future."
— AZURE
"Breaking Habits, a new installation by interdisciplinary Dutch studio RAAAF, explores how a chair-free environment could have positive health outcomes."
— On Dutch TV, Thursday January 26 : a preview of RAAAF’s new installation.
