Daily.Nature — The Masked Architects

THE MASKED ARCHITECTS PROJECT — DAILY.NATURE

Manal Rachdi — OXO Architectes, 2016

CONTEXT

Daily.Nature is a work created in 2016, commissioned by Art of Change 21 — a non-profit association founded in 2014 by French actors from the fields of culture and sustainable development. Art of Change 21 operates internationally on environmental issues through creativity, interdisciplinarity, and co-creation. The project is endorsed by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and was conceived for a collective exhibition.

A MANIFESTO-OBJECT

Daily.Nature is simultaneously an artistic object, a manifesto, and a demonstrator. Handcrafted as a prototype, it makes no claim to industrial production: it puts forward a hypothesis, an image, a provocation about what our relationship to urban air could become.

The piece condenses the DNA of OXO Architectes and our vision of the issues that will shape the architecture of tomorrow: air quality, the place of the living, and design's capacity to make invisible problems visible.

THE GESTURE

Rather than yielding to a technological solution, we returned to a mechanism that has worked since the beginning of time: the natural capacity of plants to purify air. The mask takes the form of a constellation of bubbles, each one housing a depolluting plant. Connected by a network of tubes, these bubbles capture contaminated air, circulate it through the vegetation, and deliver it back to the wearer — filtered, through a final mouthpiece — like a recovered breath of fresh air.

RESONANCE

Conceived in 2016, long before the mask became an everyday object through the pandemic, Daily.Nature holds a particular resonance today: a work that, unintentionally, anticipated an era.