We tend to forget the landscapes where our cities sit on. Bushes is an experiential and temporary installation that brings those landscapes into an urban public space. It recuperates and celebrates a landscape and an architecture typology.

It reutilises the branches cut when forests are “cleaned”, and in particular, aromatic ones. It is a smelly and ageing installation that changes scale and permits humans and other animals to inhabit a bush, and allows to value and appreciate the beauty of decaying organic matter. It also celebrates the witches that lived in the forests and used aromatic plants for their cures, and holes have been cut to frame the stars.

The space is inspired in the ephemeral constructions that shepherds used to build in the mounts to shelter with their sheep from the bad weather, some of which can still be found in different regions of the Iberian Peninsula. These structures, commonly named “chozos” had a cylindrical shape and were covered with a green roof. They were what we could now call interspecies constructions, where animals and humans shared their heat. Re-imagining an almost lost typology, Bushes was built with the same technique by family members of goatherds, contributing to passing on a craft skill that may otherwise get lost.

Through Bushes we explore the thin lines between waste and discarded, re-use and re-cycle, in particular with/in the vegetal world. We propose another formulation, where the Climate Imaginary is constructed with decaying elements to challenge the modern imaginary that connects life with beauty and death to ugliness, dirt and therefore unwanted.

We built a prototype, in the same woods where the branches were re-collected, to celebrate the winter solstice with a party. As a multispecies shed, the following weeks nearby goats ate most of the lower leaves…

C+ Arquitectas
Design: Nerea Calvillo, Marina Fernández
Construction: Luismi Quintana Team
Status: Ephemeral
Photography: Asier Rua, C+
La Vera, Extremadura, 2019

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