This summer, la maison rouge has commissioned the American artist Andrea Blum to create a café in its patio, an area open to the sky at the heart of the foundation.
For la maison rouge, Andrea Blum has imagined a pavilion that stands on piles in the middle of the patio, which she transforms into an aviary.
Birdhouse Café (the project’s name) is intended as an extension of the Foundation’s own café, a social setting where people can meet over a drink or meal, and a place from which to observe and admire the birds as they fly around.
In a subtle switch, the observer becomes the observed: visitors sit perched inside the café, pecking at their food, while the birds fly "freely" around the pavilion. Not without a certain tongue-in-cheek humour, she turns the tables one more time by including in her project the glass-walled corridors of the exhibition space around the patio, where visitors gather to see what’s going on.