INTRODUCTION
House of Representatives is a concept development exercise, which evolved into the revision of relationships of human and animal rights. Provoked by the discovery of an unobvious and rare spatial proximity between the Parliament of Catalunya and the Barcelona Zoo, the narrative of the project took the anti-intuitive comparison of political entities and natural preserves towards a provocative non-human-centred vision on the rights of the species of the Earth.
The unpredictable consequences of Covid pandemic reveal the equal footing of humanity and other species in the eyes of a common threat. The virus is often specie-blind, and so are we when envisioning the well-being of the living systems.
CONTEXT
Spatial context
Legislative context
COMPARISON
Comparative study
ANIMAL [HUMAN] RIGHTS
The recent polemics on extending the animal-related legislation only illustrate how insufficient and selective the current legal system is towards other species. The laws enforcing animal protection are often culturally biased and rarely target the exploitive relationship our society had constructed against other living systems. Even extensive and elaborate regulations would not be able to shift the paradigm away from human-centered abusive view of the global ecosystem.
Once the legal framework is set to consider the human society as a subset of a planetary living system, the anthropocentric concepts of rights and property will be reinterpreted. Therefore, the hierarchical relationship of human domination over other species will be able to transform towards more balanced coexistence.
Human rights as a subset of animal rights
References
1 – Open Data BCN – Ajuntament de Barcelona’s open data service. (2021). Retrieved 14 January 2022, from:
https ://opendata-ajuntament.barcelona.cat/en
House of Representatives is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed Master in City and Technology in 2021/2022
Students: Joseph Bou Saleh, Jiyun Lee, Dimitrios Lampriadis and Robert Youssef
Faculty: Nicolay Boyadjiev