It could be ironic that formerly apocalyptic visions—flooding and fire—describe a new normal for many American cities. Just as New York City floods, so too do its burnt orange skies broadcast the simultaneously near and far presence of the March 2023 Canadian wildfires. The end of the world has been a reality for non-humans for some time now. The Atlas for the End of the World maps the apocalyptic collapse of species biodiversity in the wake of human urbanization and industrialization of agriculture.[1] So does the Map of Life, documenting the impact of urban land expansion projected to 2050 and the concomitant loss of other species.[2] These data visualizations point to the seeming inevitable increase of urban territory, and the concomitant need that wilderness—habitat for other species—be designed and built into cities.
And architects have dreamed this for centuries: Piranesi’s overgrown ruins of Paestum from the 1770s depict the margins of a city inhabited by animals and outcasts; that in the demise of human buildings, emerges living space for species seen as foreign to the city. Some hundred years later, the ruins of classical architecture provided novel ecosystems meticulously noted by the naturalist Richard Deakin in his 1855 The Flora of the Colosseum. He catalogued and illustrated 420 different species of plants growing spontaneously on and in the Roman Colosseum.[3] In Urbana Natura, urban geographer Matthew Gandy describes multiple examples of ruin fostering new life: for example, fireweed appeared in many of London’s ruins in 1944.[4] This article argues that rather than the demolition of the city, it is the rethinking of building surfaces that can dramatically expand non-human’s potential habitats. New York offers a site for several projects that indicate a “non-human turn” in architecture.
Urban wildlife
The city as a historical form has a conflicted relationship with biodiversity preserve. The global literature scholar, Martin Puchner, suggests that the earliest urban precincts, such as the city of Uruk described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, celebrated its successful separation of human and non-human realms: the city of Uruk as a walled enclosure that separated humans from the wilderness. [5] Yet when disaster strikes the city, biodiversity is secured within walled enclosures, from Noah’s Ark in the Hebrew Old Testament to Utnapishtim’s giant boat safeguarding fauna in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both arcs were built expressly for the focus of safeguarding human existence in the wake of disaster, as it was understood—even then—that human existence depends on biodiversity.
Today, the conflict between biodiversity and urbanization reaches new extremes. Massive urban development characterizes the current Anthropocene period to the degree that the UN has proposed the “Urban Anthropocene” as a more descriptive way to characterize human activity on the planet, while the UN Population Division estimates that seven in ten people will live in urban areas by 2050.[6] For non-humans, this period represents the sixth mass extinction of global species.[7] Recent reports on planetary biodiversity indicate the alarming extent of the global decline of animal biodiversity: “global biodiversity is entering a mass extinction, with ecosystem heterogeneity and functioning, biodiversity persistence, and human well-being under increasing threat.”[8]
The biodiversity crisis, which implicates human survival from food supply to clean air and water, has turned to view cities as a new opportunity for relatively new coexistence among planetary species. Singapore sets a global standard, from the design of its “Gardens by the Bay” nature preserve / public park to the work of its National Biodiversity Centre in developing media allowing a broad public to participate in geotagging the city’s biodiversity. New York follows suit in a more dispersed format. In 2019, NYC Local Law 92/94 mandated green and/or solar roofs on all new construction or significant alteration, designating rooftops as a potential harbor for biodiversity. Other projects seek to secure urban ground against rising sea level. SCAPE’s Living Breakwater, a project that had its inception in the MOMA Rising Currents exhibition (2010), has been realized off of the south shore of Staten Island as an artificial reef that supports aquatic fauna while protecting the Long Island shore from storm surges. SCAPE’s project is noteworthy for its sensitive address of aquaculture, kayaking and marine education in communicating the value of coastal biodiversity. The Eastside Resilience project proposes a series of habitats and wildlife pockets, communicating the value of biodiversity as it relates defensively to protecting Manhattan from rising waters; and the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway as a whole demonstrates the currency of a more biodiverse approach to the city.[9] These projects suggest that certain of the less developable horizontal surfaces—waterways, floodzones—can somewhat pragmatically be allocated to biodiversity support. That a limited footprint be allocated to biodiversity, seems to replicate the limitations of Noah’s and Utnapishtim’s arcs, or the slivers of biodiversity corridors that emerge in West Coast cities. Yet the city harbors far more potential for biodiversity support in its vertical surfaces.
Feral Surfaces
New York City buildings comprise about one hundred square miles of facades, many of which signify dazzling wealth with glazed surfaces that can fry sidewalks as well as kill birds.[10] Developments such as Hudson Yards reach new heights while extolling their proximity to the High Line; BIG’s recent Spiral promises in graphics writ large on its façade to extend “From the High Line to the skyline,” somehow glossing the fact that the combination of extensive glazing and greenery presents a certain death to migrating birds. Hudson Yards participates in the proliferation of glazed towers that compound urban heat and decimate avian biodiversity. If even a small portion of these walls –for example adding to facades whose orientations to the sun are preferred by native pollinators— could be adapted and dotted with niches and nesting spaces, the city would become more of a living fabric with ecological benefits for many species.
The notion that a building surface could host other forms of life seems to lie deep in the architectural imaginary: if one views the bee-framing roundels of Borromini’s St Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome more literally, one sees an advertisement for cavity-dwelling bees. Likewise, the vermiculated stone of certain city-buildings—the Porte Saint Martin, the Louvre in Paris, the former Vanderbilt residence at 647 Fifth in New York—relate to this idea. Vermiculated, pecked, honeycombed, such treatments of stone surfaces refer the marks, burrows, holes that register animal habitation, as if architects of the 18th and 19th century desired a vestige of the non-human presence to remain inscribed across the city’s buildings. This raises the question for contemporary architecture, which offers a checkered scenario: architecture schools teem with multi-species studio projects; clusters of designers have produced multi-species installations, yet the larger integration of more-than-human habitats as new building products and components remains minimal. CookeFox’s terra-cotta multi-species screening may present one of the sole examples of a façade-product addressing non-humans, yet it has yet to be deployed on an actual building façade.[11]
As Lydia Kallipoliti notes in her recent Histories of Ecological Design, an unfinished cyclopedia, practices such as Ants of the Prairie, Terreform One and Harrison Atelier represent a “non-human” turn in architecture.[12] Each practice has created small scale structures and installations featuring the creation of artificial habitat that effectively signals and anchors non-human species within the fabric of the city. Shared among these practices is a commitment to magnifying the problem of biodiversity collapse and building artificial habitat. Yet the modes by which to manifest the physical presence of other species differs. With “For Our neighbors” at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Ants of the Prairie has created stunning examples of installations prompting coexistence among humans and birds, drawing on the new proximities between humans and the less charismatic “middle species” for whom Joyce Hwang has addressed her research and design over two decades. The Brooklyn Navy Yard hosted a modular cricket farm designed and built by Terreform ONE, a striking structure that magnified the chirps of its cricket inhabitants while demonstrating the compelling logics and aesthetics of insect sourced protein. Terreform ONE has underscored design that raises awareness for endangered species, eloquently summarizing this message as “Design against extinction” in their 2019 book, Design With Life.
The idea that the city harbor surfaces that are “feral” draws on the stunning research of Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou in articulating a more-than-human cityscape as the Feral Atlas.[13] The project description invokes “feral” ecologies as those “that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control.”[14] In the exquisite drawings of the Feral Atlas, we find that the detritus of human activity can create now habitats for opportunistic species such as maribou storks nesting in dumped styrofoam mountains. Zhou described the drawings as a way to test the non-designed consequences of human infrastructure. The debris of human design forms a feedstock for installations such as Terreform ONE’s Bio-Informatic Digester, that prompts mealworms to feast upon Styrofoam packaging, creating a compostable mulch as a beneficial byproduct. The feral quality of these projects alludes as much to the wildness of the non-human species as it does to the untamable amounts of waste material produced by human activity. Yet the term feral harbors another meaning which is important to invoke in multi-species work: it derives from the Latin feralis, meaning funerary, or belonging to the dead. The term feral is useful in its potential conflation of meanings—that the wild things are dying. How design can begin to inscribe the reality of biodiversity loss into a series of design proposals, forms the starting point for our own firm Harrison Atelier’s approach to designing artificial habitats that seek to stem yet acknowledge the loss of biodiversity.
The aesthetics of number
The immensity of planetary biodiversity, as well as its high rate of loss, makes it difficult to comprehend alarming rates of extinction against the background rate. To be fully feral, then, suggests that the dying dimension of wild things be given some if not equal footing. Designing feral surfaces would address this representational challenge as an aesthetics of enumeration capable of addressing the large numbers of biodiversity loss.
For example, insect populations, which represent about 80% of animal life on the planet, are collapsing so rapidly that scientists term our period one of “global Insect Apocalypse” and hazard a 75% decline of insect populations over the last 50 years.[15] The loss of insect life can only be estimated, because it forms a relatively large knowledge gap: only 1% of the estimated 1 million known insect species (of an estimated possibility of 5.5 million species) has been assessed. For native bees, the knowledge gap is equally significant. Many are familiar with the charismatic European honey bee, successfully domesticated globally for agricultural pollination for several centuries. Yet of the approximately 20,000+ species of bees on the planet, only about 10 of these are honey bees; the rest are native bees, responsible for pollinating about 80% of flowering plants across the planet. Native bees do not produce honey, nor do they live in hives, yet these critical specialist and generalist pollinators anchor a base of the food web. North America hosts some 4,000 species of native bees, for which the Center for Biological Diversity Report assessed that there was data on only 7% of these, of which over half were endangered.[16] This sequence of figures is likely quite boring to the design-motivated reader, and herein lies the design challenge: how to render these numbers—that address the dying of wild things—compelling, accessible, and urgent?
In wrestling with the aesthetics of number, I return to Elaine Scarry’s distinction of “narrative compassion” (that felt by one human identifying with the trauma of another, individual) and “statistical compassion” (that capacity to identify with people that one never experiences as individuals and knows only through numeric data).[17] She suggests that statistics often fail to inspire interest or compassion. The numbers somehow close down an empathetic response. Yet many examples of design demonstrate how numbers can represent a difficult story: from the 58,281 names of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, to Höweler+Yoon Architecture’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, inscribed with 577 names of enslaved men and women who labored on the UVA Grounds, along with 4,000 more stone marks estimating the number of the site’s enslaved laborers who remain unknown. The visualization of the estimated loss—as a scale that identifies individual and collective loss— seems significant as a way to evoke statistical compassion. Perhaps then we have some models for invoking this elusive type of “statistical compassion” as a design that recognizes the dual valences of the term feral as an accounting.
Harrison Atelier, 2024 Feral Surface, Barcelona, Reusing Rooftops, Honorable Mention © Harrison Atelier.
How design can count
The recent work of our firm, Harrison Atelier, demonstrate how design can build habitat and “count” species, and in doing so, can create design that contributes to a planetary accounting of biodiversity. One dimension that differentiates our work is its enumerative quality and focus on monitoring systems; another is the focus on native bees as our “insect clients,” for whom we seek eventually to claim urban vertical surfaces as new habitat. Design can count therefore in its contribution to urban conditions (attenuating heat, increasing air quality and absorbing water) as well as adding to reconciliation ecology and scientific efforts to monitor biodiversity.
Harrison Atelier, Feral Surfaces Installation, Barcelona Architecture Festival, 2023 © MODEL / City of Barcelona.
The accounting is literal in our design: 363 concrete panels each containing a maximum of 50 nesting tubes for the Pollinators Pavilion in Hudson NY, 2350 mycelium panels each containing a single nesting hole for the Feral Surfaces installation in Barcelona, and 63 hempcrete blocks each containing 80 nesting tubes for the Pollinators Arch on Governors Island, NY—allocate space for native bee nests as well as for the cameras and microprocessors that do the counting. Cameras and sensors can record in a non-invasive and continuous fashion, as any building surveillance system can demonstrate. We shifted the camera away from the human and towards the non-human native bee, creating building cladding that can accommodate both monitoring systems and habitat. The “counting” occurs outside of the building as we use AI technology to read and identify bees recorded by out monitoring system.[18]
Harrison Atelier, Pollinators Arch, The Bee Conservancy, Governors Island, 2024 © Harrison Atelier.
Harrison Atelier’s Feral Surfaces, commissioned for the 2023 Barcelona Architecture Festival under the artistic direction of Eva Franch i Gilabert, transformed an impervious urban surface into a billboard for native bees by introducing a constructed landscape of native bee-friendly plants and 2,350 diamond-shaped mycelium panels. The Feral Surface installation sought to enumerate, visualize and count these pollinators as denizens of the urban space by framing each habitat: each panel was about 6 cm thick with a 10 cm diagonal tubular cavity drilled into it as a potential habitat for a cavity-dwelling solitary bee. Each panel has a single hole about 1 cm in diameter as the entrance to the habitat. The hole offers a body count, a visually tally of non-human presence. As an aperture, the hole functions to give some sense of the size of the inhabitant within, recalling Auguste Perret’s equation of the portrait window with the human figure. Each panel served as a framework protecting the potential habitat of one bee. Cameras and monitors embedded in the landscape surveilled the installation surface. Framing the hole, enumerating potential habitats: this temporary installation sought to bring visibility to the habitat loss of native bees, while proposing that the city could provide a productive space for biodiversity.
Harrison Atelier, Pollinators arch, front and back of hempcrete block, 2024 © Harrison Atelier.
Moving closer to the vertical dimension of urban building, Harrison Atelier was invited to develop an entryway for The Bee Conservancy at the Urban Farm within framework of Governors Island’s Climate Campus. The arch is comprised of a grided structure that is temporary and transportable, the scaffold for hempcrete habitat blocks which contain nesting tubes for native bees, monitoring systems and pockets for vegetation / rainwater capture. A large, ear-like lobe shielding the nesting tubes from rain while “framing” these habitats, amplifying the example provided by Sant Ivo’s roundel format. How does this design count? Of the 63 hempcrete blocks, half of these hold nesting tubes (approximately 2,400 tubes in the entire structure). Endoscopic cameras are trained on the nesting tubes and operate for 3 hours a day taking real-time video that can be monitored remotely and provides a collection of images that help train our AI model to identify native bees at a family level.[19] Family gives us a low resolution portrait of native bees, yet following the article, “Just Good Enough Data,” we are aligned in suggesting that lower tech monitoring or “citizen sensing” methods can contribute new perspectives—broader but fuzzier—rather than being dismissed as non-compliant data sets.[20]
The Pollinators Arch is a temporary prototype that participates in a much larger vision for New York Harbor, one that envisages Governors Island as a Climate Campus, that triangulates with the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Brooklyn Army Terminal as centers for innovation in Climate Tech. Each site envisions a transformation of the building industry and with that, hopefully, the surfaces with which buildings are clad. Fabricating and testing monitored species habitat as cladding could return some urban surfaces to the textural richness of vermiculated stone while generating ecological services for the city.
Conclusion: the floating pig
The pig floats between the chimneys of London’s Battersea Power Station during the filming of Pink Floyd's music video in December 1976. In this context, the pig is funny. It symbolizes the unlikely. When pigs fly so to speak. And yet, a more literal reading could ask why does the urban presence of the non-human seem so implausible? Prototypes that enumerate, represent and support biodiversity in our urban fabric suggest we no longer view the juxtaposition of animal and city as an impossibility. The French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible offers the insight that the political appears when those who are not officially counted make themselves heard and seen.[21] Politics involves becoming seen and becoming counted among planetary entities. Consider the 2000+ nesting tubes and monitoring systems in each of these installations a proposal for architectural surfaces that count every solitary bees among urban denizens and brings them into our ethical regard, extending political status to entities that formerly had no place in a singular (anthropocentric) worldview.