If you believe it takes systemic thinking to ensure lasting change happens, you should visit the House of Annetta

Sometimes a project that seeks to change the future needs to be embedded in a building, whose ownership then shifts to make the project a long-term civilisational resource.

So it is with the House of Annetta, in London’s Spitalfields area. From their own site, here’s the story:

Spitalfields; where the east end meets the city of London has for centuries been a site of friction for the tectonic forces of capital and human life, a historic site of organising and people trying new things. In amongst this history sits 25 Princelet St, a large and beautiful Huguenot house built in 1705 that for the past 40 years has held an extraordinary story.

In 1980, artist and activist Annetta Pedretti came to live in the house, inhabiting it as a space for her experimental way of learning and organising community resistance. Annetta’s special area of interest and exploration was cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems. Annetta was working with cybernetics in her beekeeping, publishing, art-making, political activism and day-to-day conversation.

At her death in 2018, Annetta’s house was gifted by her family to the Edith Maryon Foundation in Switzerland who appointed the architectural collective Assemble to develop a future for the semi-renovated building. Assemble are working in collaboration with the research organisation ab__ to develop the project into a centre for research, arts and solidarity work towards transformative systems change.

Today the house is continuing the threads Annetta wove, exploring  approaches and ideas for the ways we reproduce the world through our daily lives.

More here. We are reminded of the spirit and practice of Newspeak House, equally home to tech visionaries and systems builders/hackers.