Breaking Habits is a new spatial installation at the crossroads of visual art, architecture and philosophy. The art installation by RAAAF is commissioned by the Mondriaan Fund for the visual arts. This experimental landscape inside a classic Dutch canal house breaks with entrenched living habits. Just like our offices and the rest of our sedentary society, our living rooms are filled with chairs, even though medical research has shown that sitting too much is unhealthy. RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances] explores with Breaking Habits how a world without chairs and couches could look like in 2025. This physical thinking model materializes a philosophical worldview and makes it tangible: a diagonal landscape of affordances scaffolds a more active lifestyle by inviting to change positions and explore new diagonal standing postures. Will diagonal living become the new norm?

The research for Breaking Habits was supported by an ERC Starting Grant and a VIDI-Grant by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for Erik Rietveld’s philosophical project ‘The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied Mind’. An earlier installation in research project was ‘The End of Sitting’ by RAAAF | Barbara Visser.

>>> Blog Birgit Donker (Mondriaan Fund director)

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Client: Mondriaan Fonds

Design: RAAAF

Team: Ronald & Erik Rietveld, David Habets, Cecile-Diama Samb, Joop Schroën

Execution: Schaart Adventures, Koos Schaart & Koen van Oort

Photography: Johannes Schwartz (color), Frederica Rijkenberg (black & white)

Location: Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdam

Status: Realised, 2017