Chicken Coop City

Une ferme n’est pas une fantasie architectural. C’est quelque chose de semblable a un evenement naturel, quelque chose qui est comme le visage humanize de la terre. Une espece de plante geometrique aussi liee au paysage qu’un arbre ou une coline et aussi expressive de la presence humaine qu’un meuble ou qu’une machine

Bezard Le Corbusier, La ville radieuse,

Il represente vraiment une vision radiuse de renaissance dans nos campagnes, et parce que rien, hormis l’egoisme des class possedants et d’une epoque, ne peut empecher cette vision de se realiser dans le concret.

Bezard Le Corbusier, La Ferme Radieuse,

This chicken coop, inspired by the the architect and city visionary Le Corbusier’s designs, city planning, and writing, is an attempt to purify the spiritual lives of the chicken inhabitants through modernist architecture. By creating a work of art for the chickens–an installation that gives the chickens a vision of a vast chicken metropolis, we are attempting to progress towards, like the “End of Man” contemplated by Kojev, an “End of Chicken,” with which the Natural and Human aspects of chickenhood are finally reconciled (in the Hegelian sense) and a period of post-chicken experimentation and play creates fresh ideas, fresh works, fresh eggs. This installation has three parts. An exterior design inspired by Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame (for these chickens are notre dames) greets visitors to the community garden. Within the coop, we are providing a high-rise nesting box and a mural of the utopian city. In the future, the chickens will be able to look out upon a vast garden vista, a garden of plants particularly enjoyed by chickens. In return, the chickens will perhaps teach us much about the history of modernism and its implications for contemporary attempts to reconcile urban life with the natural world.

This project is being realized as a collaboration with Erin Stack of the Green Artist League with the help of numerous volunteers and chicken experts and enthusiasts. It is located at the New Eden Collaborative community garden at the First Parish Church in Newburyport, MA.