X. Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us

Introduction: Going to Ground

When the Aqua skyscraper was completed in Chicago in 2010, by architect Jeanne Gang, it was lauded as a shining example of a building constructed for human occupation that also took into account the lives of other animals. Its wave-like facade and fritted glass were designed to stop birds flying into the building's windows, injuring or killing themselves. A low bar to set, perhaps, for an architecture that accommodates animals, but that is hardly surprising given our long history of seeing animals as outside of, even beneath, the human. More usually, animals are designed for only when they are deemed of use to humans, whether as livestock, domestic pets, spectacles to consume in zoos, menageries and aquaria, or objects of scientific manipulation in laboratories. If animals cannot be instrumentalized, they are usually ignored; if those animals take it upon themselves to inhabit buildings, they are invariably regarded as pests and removed or annihilated. When the global construction industry is one of the principal drivers of climate change and species extinction, there is an urgent need to transform our relationship with animals, to build with animals not just in mind, but also as cohabitants that seeks some measure of recompense for the long, sad history of human exceptionalism.

We need, in short, an animal architecture, the subject of this book. It will consider thirty different animals in order to open up new ways of thinking about the relationship between architecture and the more-than-human. It moves from some of the smallest visible organisms (insects) to the largest (elephants); from the domesticated (cats and dogs) to the despised (wasps and rats). What if architecture were to simply become more deeply attuned to the other life forms that already use it? Examples in this book include spiders spinning their webs in the dark corners of rooms; swallows finding ideal purchase on brick walls for their saliva-mud-based nest cups; rats making their homes in the subterranean spaces of the city; beavers working alongside humans as landscape engineers; cats and dogs appropriating our furniture and fittings as their own places of rest. There is hardly any part of the human-built environment that cannot be inhabited or changed by non-humans, yet people are usually very selective as to which animals they allow in and which they diligently keep out or eliminate.

To open up space for animals in architecture is to first become aware of how non-human life is already enmeshed in both our buildings and our imaginations. By paying close attention to how animals produce and/or occupy both space and structures for themselves, this book asks what might be required to design with animals. By focusing on imaginative engagements with animals, it stretches the possibilities of solidarity with more-than-humans. At the same time, though, it provides an unflinching account of what non-human life gets sacrificed for human inhabitation: an opening up to more discomfort in the face of this; a moving towards rather than away from the mess and pain of entanglements that cannot be controlled. In short, Animal Architecture is about building in a world where humans and other animals are already entangled, whether we or they like it or not.

In this introduction I will sketch out some of the broader arguments that inform how this book explores the relationship between animals and architecture. These are, first, questions about origins in architecture and the latter's relationship with nature; second, arguments about why it's crucial that architects and planners move beyond a solely anthropocentric approach to building; third, why animals are important to consider in human constructions; and finally, why it is critical to start to care more about building for and with animals. The overarching aim of the book is to challenge prevailing understandings of the value of animals (and more generally nature) within architectural practice, namely as 'others' that are only ever construed in terms of their usefulness to humans. Undermining this holds open the possibility of a richer but uneasy approach to animals that lets go of instrumental thinking in favour of much more open understandings. […]

[…] Felling a tree for use as a building material means destroying a life-world (regardless of whether this act is offset by planting another tree in its place). Even if we do not consider a plant to be a living being (and most plant scientists would now dispute this), a single tree nevertheless supports a huge array of animal life, from insects burrowing into its bark to birds nesting in its canopy. Using deadwood is arguably more destructive, given that fallen trees generally support more life than growing ones, as decaying wood provides sustenance to all manner of other animals, fungi and protozoa. Even the most primitive act of dwelling described by Vitruvius - excavating a hole in the ground or retreating to a cave - results in some level of destruction: other lives are always displaced and sacrificed for the sake of our own. Indeed, the very act of being alive, whether of a plant or animal, means an ongoing and unrecoverable expenditure of energy that will eventually result in the death of any organism. In this more realistic mode of understanding, speculating about the origins of architecture is not a way of imagining human building returning to nature (unless this refers to a thoroughly human understanding of nature), but rather the opposite, namely, retreating to a world inside by disconnecting from nature that is seen as threatening (the same applying to other animal architectures such as termite mounds and birds' nests). To build a shelter means to purposefully exclude what is outside: the very act of construction encloses and partitions the world, even as it also creates something new. The outside of the 'primitive hut' is precisely the 'nature' that, millennia later, would become so revered by those seeking to justify architecture's supposed 'natural' basis. Perhaps the more truthful question to ask about architecture's destructiveness is not whether the latter can somehow be 'solved' (namely, reduced to zero), but rather how it can be both accepted and mitigated - a far more troublesome question than that of finding sustainable or resilient architectural solutions. 

Thinking of architecture's relationship with nature as a difficult negotiation as to what will inevitably be destroyed results in a different way of thinking about concepts such as sustainability. Anthropologist Tim Ingold has put forward the idea of 'correspondence' to describe how humans can relate more respectfully to the world they inhabit. Acknowledging that all living beings - human and more-than-human - are always enmeshed, correspondence 'goes along' with the world rather than seeing it as a series of problems to be solved. In this mode of understanding, 'lives, in their perpetual unfolding or becoming, simultaneously join together and differentiate themselves, one from another' (Ingold, 2021). A useful way of thinking about architectural correspondences is to consider the nature of the ground; and Ingold does this himself in an essay responding to the makeshift dwellings created by artist Tim Knowles in the Scottish Highlands from 2015 to 2019. Here, Ingold recasts the origins of architecture as 'going to ground', that is, constructing a hide that aspires to invisibility because concealment offers the best form of protection against nature. Contrasting the characteristic way in which the built environment tries to make the ground impermeable - think of asphalt road surfaces or concrete floors - the hide is 'an intricately folded or crumpled volume of heterogeneous materials', where the human inhabitant ‘nestles into a fold much as you would into a cradle, co-opting its existing features with only the barest of additions’ (Ingold, 2021). 

Architecture that is a folding into the world does not try to make an impermeable ground between humans and nature, but instead engages in creating correspondences. When I visited the Lammas eco-village in spring 2019, I was struck by the way those in the community are more open than is usually the case to accommodating animals in their buildings. For example, in the guesthouse where I stayed, a newly emerged queen wasp was beginning to construct a new nest on the ceiling. Most noticeable was the buzzing sound of her wings, vibrations that liquefied the wood pulp she had collected with which to build. Next door, in Tao and Hoppi Wimbush's timber-built house, a robin repeatedly flew through the open front door to take tidbits from the kitchen, while a succession of birds, including barn owls, made their nests inside the roof-space, accessing it through a circular hole intentionally cut into the wall. It was the porosity of both buildings that allowed animals to come inside, whether deliberately designed or a consequence of makeshift approaches to building that left gaps between doors, windows and walls. In more conventional buildings, it is precisely this kind of porosity that is so assiduously avoided, with all kinds of specialist materials designed to seal up any gaps. What the unconventional openness of the buildings at Lammas revealed was the multiple animal lives that desire to become enmeshed with our own, if they are facilitated to do so. My distinct discomfort in the face of a nest-building wasp demonstrated to me that perhaps the biggest obstacle to a genuinely ecological architecture is the human sense of revulsion at nature, unbidden, trying to get back in. But gaps in buildings are, ironically, ecological anathema to many, namely because they wastefully leak precious energy. It is even the clarion call of the protest group Insulate Britain: poorly sealed buildings account for a large percentage of not only the UK's carbon footprint, but those of many other countries with sizeable historic housing stocks. But perhaps the point is that instrumental 'solutions' to perceived architectural problems tend to focus on the gains and ignore the inevitable losses that come with any kind of building.

Human constructions are, at every moment, assailed by a nature that is always trying to get back in; only ceaseless maintenance prevents buildings from being overtaken by the world outside. At the smallest level, impermeable matter is always being broken down by either its own internal entropy or the friction of other things on it, whether we regard those things as inert (weather) or alive (plants, animals, fungi and protozoa). In architectural terms, it is perhaps ruins that are the most potent expressions of the attritional relationship between nature and culture: ruins stand testament to the inevitable folly of the human idea of permanence - the impermeability of architecture to decay an illusion that ruins forcefully shatter. If architecture is to ever open up to what is outside of itself, it must relinquish the pretence of permanence.

We can now return to challenge the idea of the primitive human shelter imagined by Vitruvius. Instead of a technologically empowered man becoming the measure of all things, including his first house, we instead encounter humans that are only all too aware of their vulnerability, namely their entwinement in a world of other lives that ceaselessly spill into theirs, however much they would like it to be otherwise. With acceptance of this vulnerability, these humans already know that any shelter they construct will inevitably be folded back into the ground from which they and it were both born. Thus the origins of architecture inevitably lead to the ends of architecture, to a greater sense of awareness of what happens when buildings die (Cairns, 2014) […]

[…] Another way of opening up to animals is to acknowledge their agency as builders. Even though the sophistication and complexity of animal-built structures, such as termite mounds or the bowers of bowerbirds, has been affirmed by animal scientists such as Mike Hansell, there is still a widespread assumption that only human architects are able to imagine what they want to build; other animals build because they are merely obeying preprogrammed instincts that are hard-wired into their genes (Hansell, 2009). As will be explored more fully in the first chapter of this book, most recent scientific studies of animal behaviour now assert quite the opposite: that even animals without brains, for example ants and termites, exert some measure of individual agency when they build collectively (Hansell, 2009). Moreover, studying animal architecture reveals that what humans like to call the 'environment' - meaning a separate domain outside of the human-built world - is actually fully entwined with architecture. Notable examples are the dams and lodges constructed by beavers. These do not merely 'sit' in an environment, enclosing and cordoning it off; rather beaver-built structures actively constitute the environment over time. The fact that beavers are now being co-opted by humans in the search for 'natural' solutions to the increased incidence and severity of climate-change-induced flooding shows that some are becoming more attuned to the intermeshing of buildings and environment and their co-constitution. Yet what many are still slow to realize is that this coexistence of buildings and environment applies to every single living organism, whether they build anything or not. For the environment is never something that is outside of any given life-form that inhabits it; rather it amounts to a single gigantic organism made up of innumerable parts that actively constitute and change it. […]

[…] If humans were to become more attuned to the lives of animals in architecture, can they ever really know what those animals actually want? Is it really possible to think like another animal, even another human being? In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked, in a famous article, 'What is it like to be a bat?', a work often quoted in studies of consciousness, human or otherwise (Nagel, 1974). Nagel chose bats as his subject because of their ability to perceive using sonar receptors, a quality humans simply do not possess. In Nagel's estimation, attempts to understand bat sonar through scientific analysis can only lead further away from the desired human empathy with bats: such objectivity is always about creating distance between the observer and her/ his subject. But Nagel also rejected imaginative modes of engagement - these are merely superficial human projections of what it is like to be a bat - very far indeed from actually being a bat. Nagel's conclusion was that there is no way of understanding what he termed the 'alien' perception of bats (or, indeed, any other life form, including other humans). For individual humans are intractably locked into their own subjectivity when it comes to perception and, indeed, imagination. They cannot help but anthropomorphize everything they try to understand.

Nagel's disparagement of the human imagination has been forcefully challenged by Object-Oriented Ontology. For example, Ian Bogost, in his book Alien Phenomenology (2012), asserted the value of imagination as an invaluable faculty because it allows humans to empathize with things that are inescapably alien. We can, as Bogost himself did, imagine bat sonar as being like that of a submarine, or of an aircraft control system: we readily create images of what is, to us, an invisible form of perception (as you are no doubt doing at this very moment) (Bogost, 2012). These are of course, wholly anthropomorphic metaphors, but that is to be expected; Bogost contests Nagel's pessimism in his assertion that anthropomorphic analogies take us outside of ourselves because they are attempts to create empathy with things that are genuinely alien to us. Unlike scientific objectivity, imagination never claims that knowledge of the more-than-human can ever be exhaustive; rather, as already stated, it is knowledge ‘askance' or at a distance. Political theorist Jane Bennett has argued that the risks associated with such anthropomorphism (superstition, romanticism, animism and so on) 'work against anthropocentrism' because ‘a chord is struck between person and thing, as I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman environment (Bennett, 2000)? In Bennett's estimation, the dangers of anthropomorphism are hardly comparable to those of anthropocentrism which, in its current form, is rapidly stripping the planet of its remaining biological life.

Nagel's pessimism has also been challenged by novelist J. M. Coetzee in The Lives of Animals (1999). Here, a fictional writer, Elizabeth Costello, delivers two lectures at an academic institution where she defends the human capacity for imaginative identification with animals. In a direct challenge to Nagel, she asserts that 'there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another' and that it is through the 'sympathetic imagination' that we can experience the way in which a 'living bat is ... full of being' in just the same way as 'being fully human' is to be 'full of being'. In a damning and controversial indictment of the supposed 'neutrality' of scientific objectivity, Coetzee, through his invented character, argues that the horror of the Nazi death camps was a direct result of an inability of the killers to 'think themselves into the place of their victims': the holocaust rendered as a failure of imagination as much as the consequence of an inherently evil regime and its machinery of annihilation (Coetzee, 1999). This may seem an extreme point of comparison to make in terms of how we think about animals, but it is meant to shock us into a realization of the true scale and horror of the almost ceaseless mass-murder of animals that humans have orchestrated (the tens of billions of animals that are now slaughtered for human consumption every year) (Thornton, 2019).

The centrality of imagination in thinking ourselves into the lives of animals has significant implications for architecture. 

References

Bennett, J. (2000) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, 120.

Bogost, I. (2012) Alien Phenomenology; or, What It's Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis, 62–5.

Cairns, S. & Jacobs, J. M. (2014) Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture, Cambridge.

Coetzee, J. M. (1999) The Lives of Animals, Princeton, 33–5.

Hansell, M. (2009) Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture, Oxford, 60.

Ingold, T. (2021) Correspondences, Cambridge, 9, 107.

https://insulatebritain.com/, accessed May 10, 2022.

Nagel, T. (1974) What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, Philosophical Review, LXXXIII (4), 435–50.

Thornton, A. (2019) 'This Is How Many Animals We Eat Each Year', World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org, accessed February 8, 2019.

 

Paul Dobraszczyk, Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us, Reaktion Books, 2023, 7–23.

 

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

Copyright © Paul Dobraszczyk 2023