The Sasse: Where love stories develop
between art and viewer

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"Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?" — Gaston Bachelard

For the Birds brings together architects and artists from around the world to answer a single question. What does home mean?

The birdhouse is the common language. What each maker says with it is entirely their own.

Architects come from around the world. UNStudio, our collaborating partner from Amsterdam, reimagines the birdhouse through the lens of architecture. Artists and designers come from across the United States. Student architects work beside them, learning the form by remaking it. Each maker arrives with their own materials, their own philosophies, their own instincts. Some build something you could measure. Others build something you could only feel.

The results range from the rigorously architectural to the deeply personal. From the buildable to the frankly impossible. Each one becomes a meditation on shelter, on care, on what it means to prepare a place for another.

None of these will ever hold a bird. That was never the point.
The birdhouse is an old form. A roof, a wall, a way in. Every culture has made one. Every child knows what it is. And yet the moment you hand that form to a serious maker, the questions begin to rise. What does it mean to offer shelter. What changes when we design not for ourselves but for something smaller, something wilder. What is a home without a hand that made it.

Every piece lives twice. Once on the gallery wall, and again in the catalog, a book that travels to places the exhibition never will.

When the show closes, the works go out to find homes of their own. Each is offered at auction, and what it raises keeps the museum's doors open and its exhibitions free.

Together these works form a conversation no single object could carry alone. It is both universal and deeply local. It belongs to everyone who has ever made a home, traditional or not.

May – June 2027