When you live in a city where sites are undermaintained,
you’ll see that nonhuman species, plants, and animals take over.
So if you think about the fact that we’re surrounded by species and that is a default
condition of the world, we have to include them in the way that we’re designing the world.
I’m Joyce Hwang. I am an architect and I’m an associate professor at University of Buffalo.
Currently, I direct a practice that looks at urban ecology and how we might integrate
wildlife and nonhuman species into the built environment.
When I first started exploring Buffalo, I started noticing
all sorts of different conditions in dilapidated buildings, like cracks and crevices
and places in structures where you would see small animals living.
Like, if you look at the grate there, that’s like the perfect kind of situation where
a bird or a bat could fly in easily and really kind of make their home up there.
These kinds of spaces are amazing.
The grain silos have an important role in shaping the industrial and cultural heritage of Buffalo,
but they’re also very important in the city’s architectural heritage as well.
And some of these sites have become very important in the exploration of my research.
I think there are too many people who are making decisions about
design based on very shortsighted visions. And so they are thinking, you know, “How do I solve one
problem with one thing?” You know, “How do I solve the problem of bird poop by keeping birds away?”
And I think it’s really important to give people a kind of broader option.
I work a lot through physical models looking at
different kind of configurations, different experiences, and trying to kind of daydream a bit.
My first exploration in thinking about animals and architecture was actually Habitat Wall.
Okay, so this is one module of Habitat Wall. Each one of the bays has a bat habitat area,
which are all these kind of striated areas with a lot of gaps for bats to inhabit.
You create a condition that bats would find suitable. They want to be in covered areas.
They want to be able to kind of slide in some place where they fit but other animals don’t fit.
After working with models and figuring out construction,
we’ll build the project at full scale, which is what you’re seeing here.
Looking this way, this is what a bat would see if they were flying into the space: you would see
all these, like, crevices and spaces to kind of nest in.
In terms of the kind of larger context, these are ideas for making spaces within
a kind of wall that might contribute to a larger idea for building design.
Well, Bat Cloud is one of the installations that I have developed that
aims to bring awareness to animals as an important part of the ecosystem.
It is a hovering mass of pods or vessels that each have bat-habitation kind of conditions in
the upper portions, and they’re kind of hanging baskets with vegetation below.
It’s like hanging from a series of cables that are strung between trees.
This is a project that I wanted to feel like a kind of floating mass in the woods,
and it would feel, like, a very strange presence in a context where you wouldn’t expect it.
It’s hard to characterize the most rewarding parts of my practice,
but I think one of the most rewarding things is students becoming interested in
environmental issues when maybe they weren’t necessarily that interested beforehand.
So this is Elevator B. I mean, this is an example of the work that I’m involved in
at the university, collaborating with like-minded faculty in the Ecological Practices Research Group
and really looking at ways that built structures can incorporate nonhuman species.
It is a tower that was designed and built by
five graduate students at the University of Buffalo in 2012,
which was a result of the Hive City competition that I coordinated along with two faculty members.
What was really important about having the Elevator B project at Silo City was,
first, is that there was already a beehive. It was very important not to
displace the beehive and just to take it away and move it to a different site, but to say, “Okay,
if this is a landscape where bees are thriving, it should remain there.”
And so this is a kind of tower that’s housing a structure inside that the students called
the “beecab.” It’s essentially like a kind of elevator cab that can be lifted and lowered. If
it comes down here at the door, the beekeeper or whoever can access the door and sort of open it,
and when it’s up in this position, you can walk in and look up and you can see bees.
If you come here in the summer it is actually quite interesting
because you can sometimes see bees flying in and out of these holes.
So it’s actually really cool in the summer, when you look up you see kind of bees swarming around
the top. It’s really also another way, I would say, of bringing some of my interest in nonhuman
species to education and really making it part of the curriculum in the department.
Animals are incredibly smart because they are survivors. They’re
building things for themselves. You look at birds making nests, they’re using resources
to make homes for themselves that are functional and also beautiful. They’re not
extracting resources. They’re able to work with what they have.
We look at the way the animals have survived for ages and ages without
causing environmental crises. I think that’s, like, an important lesson to learn.
I have been interested in, you know, how architecture can still maintain
that spectacle-like nature. You know, how can we bring awareness and bring interest through
a kind of aesthetic vision? So how do you really look at the environment, pay attention to things,
be observant, and try to kind of understand the world in a way that isn’t obvious?