In the fall of 2009, Fritz Haeg – renowned Los Angeles-based architect, artist, gardener and social designer – and New York Restoration Project (NYRP) Founder Bette Midler will celebrate Haeg’s innovative Animal Estates exhibit and habitat installation at NYRP’s Swindler Cove Park in Upper Manhattan.
Five uniquely beautiful and fully functional “estates” created for Haeg’s animal clients, all native to New York City – including the Barn Owl, Wood Duck, Purple Martin, Big Brown Bat and Northern Flying Squirrel – will be on display at various locations throughout the park. Haeg’s ongoing Animal Estates initiative produces events and exhibitions to consider the animals with which we share our cities and creates dwellings for those animals – often displaced by humans. As animal habitats dwindle daily, Animal Estates proposes the reintroduction of animals back into our cities and urban environments – providing a provocative 21st-century model for the human-animal relationship that is more intimate, visible and thoughtful.
Since the project’s launch in 2008, Haeg has installed several editions of Animal Estates – including its debut at New York City’s Whitney Museum. He continues to develop and test dwelling designs for a variety of animals, in cooperation with local specialists, throughout the world. In cities and suburbs, from public streets to private yards, prototype Animal Estates are being established in a variety of environments – each designed to attract and welcome a particular animal back into a city space that has been dominated by humans.