Eric Ellingsen

Eric founded Species of Space as an experiment in design in 2009. He recently participated in les Transculturelles des Abattoirs, in Casablanca, Morocco, the first international art and architecture bienalle in North Africa. The exhibition, "SEA: Seeing Eye Architecture—a Species of Architecture Service Animals," opens May 7 at Extension Gallery for Architecture at Archeworks.

Eric holds graduate design degrees in architecture and landscape architecture, and a master's degree in classical philosophy.

He spent a year building hand-dug wells and surveying regions for hydrological resources in Ghana. Eric is the assistant to the architecture director on an active archeological dig in Aphrodisias, Turkey, and has participated in the Smart Geometry workshops. In Sept. 2007, he participated in “Public Experiments” at Serpentine Gallery, London, as well as “Life in Space” II (2007) and III (2008), at Studio Olafur Eliasson, Berlin.

As a designer, Eric has worked for Field Operations, Ruy.Klein, and as a research assistant for Cecil Balmond.

In Sept. 2008 he co-designed and built a 23-foot interactive "Vertical Farm Model" featured at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In Oct. 2008, he built and directed the design of two large installation models for Cecil Balmond's "Solid Void" at the Graham Foundation, Chicago.

Ellingsen teaches seminars in the philosophy of ecology, non-linear systems, and history of modernism. In addition, he teaches the first-semester graduate studio in the MLA program and advanced studios in landscape urbanism and architecture.

Mixing selection and self-organization, he breeds architecture and landscape models. He also researches, writes, and designs Vertical Farming as a viable option for urban agriculture systems in the 21st century.