Lee Pivnik

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LONG-TERM
Symbiotic House
the Institute of Queer Ecology

RECENT PROJECTS
  Strange Natures
  Chimeras
  Crabgrass
  Epiphyte 

ARCHIVE  
  Spiral Stump
  Mangrove Lamp
  Holobiotic Dance Floor
  exo exo
  Biosphere 2
  Night Garden
  Cordyceps
  the other and the self
  — like poison
  Landscape Painting
  Hinterland
  Spliced Arrangements
  Primordial Soup

   eelpicnic
The Living Room (Exterior Dream Sequence), 
2023, acrylic-mounted metallic print, (27in x 16in x 1in)


Symbiotic House 
(2022 – ongoing) 


Symbiotic House is an evolving social sculpture that reimagines 
the home as a site for climate care and environmental repair. 

Every house is already symbiotic.
Symbiosis is the sustained, close relationship between two different organisms, usually over the course of their lives. The house, our most intimate connection to the built environment, is in an inseparable relationship with the environment around it. However, as it draws in energy, water, and sustenance for its inhabitants from that landscape, it usually does so at the harm of the landscape itself. These relationships must be redesigned away from parasitism, toward something more rooted in mutualism. This project aims to enact a mutualistic relationship between the built and natural environment through the creation of structures that are climate-adaptive and regenerative.

2022–2023
Initially supported by a Knight Arts Challenge Grant, Symbiotic House began as an open and participatory research initiative led by Pivnik that investigated adaptive architectural solutions to Miami’s environmental precarity. This slow, communal research was necessary to begin designing “multi-use space for multi-species survival.” Pivnik led workshops and site visits to places like Coral Castle, The Barnacle, and Miccosukee tree islands, while making speculative sculptural models of mangal dwellings. During this time, there was also a Symbiotic House lecture series at the Kampong National Tropical Botanical Garden, with speakers including Joyce Hwang, Daniel Ayat, Mamoun Nukumanu, Naomi Davis, Lauren Bon, Maurício Chades, and Jessica Martin.

2024–2026 
In Miami, where many artists live in apartments without outdoor space, Pivnik is investigating what regenerative land art and ecological architecture can look like in a city defined by its climate precarity, housing unaffordability, and some of the strictest building codes in the nation. This question has guided him through the design process of The Living Room: a retrofit of a South Beach studio apartment into an inhabitable aquaponics sculpture.
Aquaponic systems drastically reduce water needs because water is recycled through closed-loop processes. Using water representative of the areas around Lake Okeechobee most directly impacted by nutrient runoff, the sculpture will demonstrate that we can use living systems to remove excess nutrients from the greater Everglades watershed before they further disrupt aquatic environments. The Living Room was initially commissioned in 2023 as a digital artwork for the Meta City Biennale, an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Venus Lau in Shanghai, China. In 2024, Pivnik moved into the apartment that will house The Living Room, and in 2025 the project received a Creative Capital Award to catalyze its construction, which is planned to conclude by the end of 2026.

The sculpture is biomimetic, based on the wild mutualisms already present in wetlands, shaping a system where plants and aquatic animals live together for their mutual benefit. As water flows from ponds to planters, the plants remove the nutrients present from runoff. The plants filter the fish wastewater and return it to the ponds. Visually, the sculpture will reject the cold-industrial design often present in similar systems (tanks, PVC pipes, etc.) and rely on handmade ceramics, bamboo piping, and biomaterials derived from sargassum seaweed and pine rosin.

2027 – Beyond
Looking ahead, Pivnik plans to expand the scope of Symbiotic House into a larger nonprofit arts and ecology center in South Florida. This envisioned center would function as a living earthwork—combining sculptural, architectural, and ecological elements—while offering interdisciplinary research opportunities and community engagement programs centered on designing for ecological mutualism.






The Living Room (Interior Concept Render), 
2023, acrylic-mounted metallic print, (27in x 16in x 1in)





Introductory Video to Symbiotic House, and The Living Room. Click to Play.



RESEARCH



LIVING WITH THE LAND, at EPCOT, (EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE CITY OF TOMORROW) 
Orlando FL, 2023. Image credit -  Lee Pivnik


Ecological Horizons: Wet and Wild Mutualisms


Lee Pivnik | March 27, 2024
Commissioned essay for Hyundai Artlab


A kaleidoscopic look into the design process of Symbiotic House, a social sculpture for climate care and environmental repair in Florida and beyond.


Artlab Editors: For the first Ecological Horizons, Artlab Editorial’s new series, artist Lee Pivnik takes us on a meandering journey through South Florida’s ecosystems and the greater landscape of artists responding to climate collapse. A fifth-generation Floridian, Lee’s own response comes in the form of an ongoing social sculpture called Symbiotic House, which offers a prototype for how art might allow us to reimagine our relationship to the natural world beyond a framework of extraction.


Aquaponics tanks and suspended produce conveyer belts inside
LIVING WITH THE LAND, at EPCOT, (EXPERIMENTAL PROTOTYPE CITY OF TOMORROW) Orlando FL, 2023. Image credit -  Lee Pivnik





Regenerative Design Frameworks:


To better define my vision for how a “Symbiotic House” might look, feel, and engage with the world beyond its walls, I have organized a list of requirements to consider when designing for mutualism. These “10 Roots of Symbiotic Building” are intertwined, in that each must be addressed for the whole system to flourish. The framework is broad enough to be adaptable for vastly different dwellings; A houseboat floating off Key Largo could follow this system, as could a 2 bedroom apartment in Providence. 

As important as the foundation of a building, you can think of this 10 point framework as the roots of a living system. 

The 10 Roots of Symbiotic Building are synthesized from varying design frameworks, green building standards, methodologies, and requirements. The broadest and least prescriptive of these is the simple and well known list of the 5 Needs of All Living Things. Sunlight, water, air, habitat, and food. Various designers and organizations have published architectural theses that unite these core basic needs with ecological design standards. The Living Building Challenge has been an incredible guide, codifying the most ambitious guidelines for regenerative architecture into a 7 “petal” system. Earthship Biotecture outlines 6 core principles that shape how Earthships function. These are excellent, but ideal for off-grid structures, most of which are spread across the high-desert environment in Taos, NM, although they have been built globally. The now defunct Symbiotic Cities Network, founded and co-moderated by Craig Applegath and Josh Taylor, listed “9 of the most important transformations required to facilitate the transformation of our cities from parasitic to regenerative symbiotic cities”, and unlike the Earthship principles, these focus on high-density cities, carbon-zero mobility infrastructure, and designing for ecosystem services in an urban context. Similarly scaled for communities, Naomi Davis’s “Blacks in Green” organization puts into practice her 8 Principles of Green Village Building, and 12 Propositions of Grannynomics that Davis says have historically been important in African American family life, and that enable recreating walkable urban villages today. Jacob A. Littman describes 9 Principles for Regenerative Architecture in his thesis “Regenerative Architecture: A Pathway Beyond Sustainability” that goes into detail and captures some themes missing in other standards. I particularly like Littman’s “Principle of Redundancy” where “each need in the system is met with more than one solution”. And unlike the above frameworks that aim to define green or regenerative architecture, Christopher Alexander’s 7-word attempt at describing what he coins “The Quality Without A Name” focuses on the aesthetic experience and essential spirit of a place. I find his description of this nameless quality helpful when evaluating the character of designed spaces. It reads well alongside Frank Lloyd Wright’s design philosophy of Organic Architecture, which other architects have continued to elaborate and expand upon over the last century. 

My list of 10 “roots” for designing a Symbiotic House draws inspiration from these other standards, while adapting and including some guidelines for my specific purposes. 



PRESS





The A-Frame House, Siltsville, Biscayne Bay, FL. 
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik 
Chickee on a Tree Island, visited during a tour co-hosted with Love the Everglades Movement. Okeechobee, FL
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik
Earthship, Taos, NM.
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik
Hand-carved sandstone cave home, by Ra Paulette. Embudo, NM. 
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik
Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West. Main House. Joshua Tree, CA. 
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik
Historic Matheson House, Patch of Heaven Sanctuary, Redlands, FL. 
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik
Million Orchid Project, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Miami, FL. 
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik
Siltsville, Biscayne Bay, FL. 
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik 
Cosanti, Paolo Soleri, Scottsdale, NM. 
Image Credit - Lee Pivnik





SUPPORT


Founding support for Symbiotic House was awarded through a 2021 Knight Arts Challenge Grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with additional support in the years since from the Creative Capital Foundation, The Kampong National Tropical Botanical Garden, Oolite Arts, Locust Projects, the WaveMaker Grants program, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners. 








Video, Maurício Chades
Miami, FL 2025