Why designing for all species matters

Many people believe that wild animals should be kept away from spaces intended for humans. Joyce Hwang is not one of them.

“Animals, just like humans, want shelter,” says Hwang, professor of architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning and director of the practice Ants of the Prairie.  

Hwang’s work in multispecies design seeks to challenge the notions people have about the many species with which humans share the Earth. Hwang is this month’s guest on University Communications’ “Driven to Discover” podcast, where she discusses her work incorporating habitats for animals into human spaces and why that’s mutually beneficial. She also mentions some easy things homeowners can do to make their properties more accommodating to our non-human friends.

For Hwang, it all started as a young girl, when she and her sister were exploring in their suburban Los Angeles neighborhood. Hwang spotted something that caught her attention — a bird’s nest had caused an imperfection in a topiary bush. She didn’t know it at the time, but that “messiness” of seeing something out of place caused by an animal would fuel her fascination with the intersection between living beings and the built environment.

Years later, as an architect fresh out of Cornell, where she received her bachelor’s degree in architecture, Hwang received a strange request from a client: Could her building design include window ledges that would electrocute birds, thus keeping them away?

“It just felt wrong, and there were a lot of things in the profession that made me think about the environment in different ways,” says Hwang. “So I decided to go back to graduate school to understand how we might be able to shift the discipline’s thinking.”

Over the course of her career, Hwang has designed projects for bats, birds, reptiles, pollinators and other animals. Her work has been featured by the Museum of Modern Art and exhibited around the globe, from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to the Venice Biennale.

In the podcast, Hwang addresses why it’s imperative that architects design with other species in mind — hint, there’s actually a “biodiversity crisis” happening at the moment — and talks about what she learned from a friendly raccoon that lived in a tree at a previous home in Buffalo’s Elmwood Village.

She also shares tips for homeowners looking to find simple ways to provide sufficient shelter for insects and animals in the yard so that they are less inclined to take up residence in attics, basements and crawl spaces.

“As architects, I think we need to be concerned that urbanization and building … do produce some form of habitat loss because we are removing soil, we’re disturbing the land,” she says. “This is not to say that we shouldn’t build. Obviously, we should. But in the process of disturbing the land, we have to understand how we can design for species that were displaced. And this is a really important issue that I think architects and humans in general have to face.”