Designing for Other Species

For most architects, a space is usually designed with humans in mind. But as much as people have dominated the world, we also have to think about other species that play an essential role in our ecosystem. According to Joyce Hwang, architect and associate professor at the University of Buffalo, animals are all around us; it is a “default condition” of our world, making it imperative that we include them in the way we design our built environment. In the second video in the Built Ecologies: Architecture and Environment series from MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment, Hwang shows us how wildlife can and should be integrated into, rather than excluded from, built structures.

For the last decade, Hwang has been on the research frontier of interspecies architecture. In her studio, she builds and experiments with physical models that act as prototypes before construction. She shares her approach of avoiding short-term design goals that fail to consider the larger ecological impacts or unintended consequences that a built structure can have on other species. In one of her earliest works, Habitat Wall, the structure is layered with wooden slats that provide narrow, dark crevices for bats to inhabit. By creating site-specific conditions, the design allows bats to thrive even in the most crowded or unlikely of locations. With the success of the prototype, Hwang hopes that Habitat Wall will also be implemented on a larger scale in buildings.

Tapping into the playful and spectacle-like nature of architecture, Hwang believes aesthetics can increase the larger public’s awareness of how our built environment can be designed to include non-human species. In the Tifft Nature Preserve of Buffalo, New York, where the bat population has been on the decline, a hovering canopy of pods known as Bat Cloud was installed to support bat habitation in the area. Combining art with ecology, these striking pieces are filled with vegetation, soil, and native plants to provide a safe haven for insect-eating bats. Part of what makes interspecies architecture meaningful and fascinating for Hwang is the way we are prompted to change the way we see our environment, to look beyond the surface of what is invisible, and to re-examine the ways we, as humans, have also altered and inhabited a space.