"What's wrong with the primitive hut?" explores architecture's origins

2014-03-05T17:38:00-05:00

The Bowerbird is named for its very particular mating ritual, where the male constructs an elaborate bower-structure and decorates it with a shrine of colorful objects in order to attract potential mates. Males will spend hours gathering sticks and shiny things to complete their bower, which tend to follow two basic typologies: a tent-like cone of sticks, or two stick-walls in parallel, forming a little avenue. Whether the bowerbird builds the tent or the avenue depends pretty consistently on the species, but once the bowers are bedazzled, the structures become absolutely unique to that particular bird and its surroundings.

It’s not clear whether the bowerbird’s habits predate the first instance of human architecture, but to imagine that an inception point of our architectural history owes itself to a horny bird throws an interesting irreverence into the thought-piece of “what is the origin of architecture?”. Last Monday at the REDCAT theater in downtown Los Angeles, Pier Paolo Tam...

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"What's wrong with the primitive hut?" explores architecture's origins