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Despot Birdhouses

• Posted by Mark, 15 October 2008, 12:54
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A birdhouse based on Mussolini’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in King’s Wood, Kent in England

Super Kingdom is an art installation with a difference: each of the pieces on show in King’s Wood, near Ashford in Kent, is a fully-functioning animal house. They just happen to be based on a selection of infamous dictators’ palaces…

Artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson (of London Fieldworks) are behind the series of structures. They plan to make a film of the various native and non-native creatures who take up residence in the houses, as a comment on the displacement of animal (and human) communities in the face of urban development.

Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, Romania (the third largest building in the world, no less, and now home to the Romanian government) inspired this one:

While this intricate structure is based on Benito Mussolini’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (or Colosseo Quadrato) finished in 1943:

And this upside-down pyramid is based on Joseph Stalin’s “gift” to the Polish capital Warsaw in 1952 – the Palace of Culture and Science:

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