(EVENTS)
BADGERING ARCHITECTURE
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SYMPOSIUM ON CO-HABITATION WITH OTHER SPECIES
Rochester, New York
2024
This two-day symposium brought together architects, landscape architects, philosophers, architectural historians, and cultural anthropologists to discuss how contemporary experiments in multispecies design are transforming the nexus between space and species. Architecture has traditionally represented a bulwark against animality, or else, in the case of the zoo and the barn, it has functioned as a mechanism for their instrumental use. On the contrary, recent essays in multispecies design figure animals, not as threats or property, but as clients and co-designers, even neighbors. Thus a panoply of architectural technologies has recently emerged that invites urban wildlife to dwell alongside humans within the built environment, from so-called bird-friendly glass to habitable masonry, walls, and other artificial habitats.
Through a keynote address and a trio of panels on current practices, historical precedents, and pedagogical methods, this interdisciplinary, and international, group of participants asked how multispecies design enacts new forms of human and animal relation. By “badgering” architecture – pestering the discipline’s orthodox orientation to humans – Badgering Architecture aimed to deepen our understanding of the way that space speciates, organizing the possibilities and impossibilities of co-habitation with other beings.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
WHAT SPECIES IS MULTISPECIES JUSTICE?
Cary Wolfe
Cary Wolfe is the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. He is the founding editor of the Posthumanities book series at the University of Minnesota Press and the author of numerous books, edited collections, and articles on posthumanism and animal studies, including What Is Posthumanism?, Before the Law, Animal Rites, Zoontologies, Art and Posthumanism, and Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Steven’s Birds.
OPENING REMARKS
BADGERING ARCHITECTURE
Richard Fadok
Richard Fadok is a postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester, where he conducts anthropological research on human-animal relations. He is currently working on an ethnographic project about architecture for animals, titled Syntopia. His writing on multispecies design has appeared, or will soon appear, in The Multispecies Lexicon, Noema, and Urban Animalia. During a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught “Space/Power/Species,” a seminar-studio on urban wildlife and the built environment.
PANEL ONE: MULTISPECIES DESIGN TODAY
IN CONSIDERATION OF NEIGHBORS
Joyce Hwang
Joyce Hwang is an Associate Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Buffalo,, where she is also the Director of Graduate Studies. Hwang holds an MArch from Princeton University and a BArch from Cornell University. She is a registered architect in New York State, and over the past ten years her studio, Ants on the Prairie, has forwarded the practice of multispecies design, with various projects exhibited at Matadero Madrid, the Venice Biennale, and the Rotterdam Biennale. Her writing appears in World Architecture Magazine, Biophilic Cities Journal, Volume, Project Journal, Bracket, MONU, Mastermind Magazine, and Dichotomy Journal, and she is co-editor of the edited volume Beyond Patronage.
PANEL TWO: HISTORIES OF ZOOARCHITECTURE
OYSTERTECTURE: THE MOTTO OF THE MOLLUSC
Paul Dobraszczyk
Paul Dobraszczyk is a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He has previously lectured at Birkbeck College, the University of Reading, and the University of Manchester. He has a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in the history of art and architecture from the University of Reading. He is the author of eight books, including Animal Architecture, Botanical Architecture (forthcoming), Architecture and Anarchism, Future Cities, and The Dead City, as well as the co-editor of Manchester, Global Undergrounds, and Function and Fantasy. His writing also appears in The Journal of Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, CITY, Architectural History, Journal of Design History, and Technology and Culture, among others.
OF KENNELS, SPECIES, AND ENTANGLED HISTORIES
Sean Weiss
Sean Weiss is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. He was previously a lecturer at Baruch College and Colorado College. He has a PhD in art history from the City University of New York, Graduate Center, and a bachelor’s in art history from Vassar College. In addition to organizing the “Architecture and Interspecies Relations” session at the Society of Architectural Historians conference, Weiss has published on sustainability and affordable housing in Log, Journal of Urban History, and Technology and Culture. Weiss is now drafting an chapter on tombstones for dogs and an article about 18th century estate kennels.
PANEL THREE: TOWARDS A BESTIAL PEDAGOGY
TEACHING “ANIMAL ARCHITECTURE”
Claire Zimmerman
Claire Zimmerman is an associate professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where she is also the Director of the PhD program. She holds an MArch from Harvard and a PhD in architectural history from CUNY. She is the author of two monographs—one on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and another titled Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century—and soon to be the author of a third book from MIT Press named Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry. In addition to authoring numerous other essays and chapters, Zimmerman was recently appointed the associate editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
*due to a technical issue, audio is unavailable for this talk
INCLUDING ANIMALS: DESIGNING WITH MORE-THAN-HUMAN COLLABORATORS
Roxi Thoren
Roxi Thoren is a professor and the department head of landscape architecture at the Stuckeman School of Architecture, Graphic Design, and Landscape Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University. Thoren is the founder of the Fuller Center for Productive Landscapes at the University of Oregon, an internationally recognized center focused on the role of place in cultural sustainability. Alongside these efforts, she is also a Senior Fellow for Innovation and Leadership with the Landscape Architecture Foundation. Thoren holds bachelor’s in architecture from Wellesley College and a master’s in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia. She is the author of Landscapes of Change: Innovative Designs Reinventing Sites and co-author of Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes.
BECOMING MONSTER: ARCHITECTURE’S MORE-THAN-HUMAN ENTANGLEMENTS
José Ibarra
José Ibarra is an assistant professor in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. He earned his bachelor’s in architecture from Cornell and master’s from Princeton. Before joining the faculty at UC-Denver, Ibarra was an Urban Edge Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. His interdisciplinary scholarship draws on geology, posthumanist philosophy, anthropology, and speculative fiction to interrogate the relationships between architecture, time, and crisis as it unfolds in social unrest, environmental degradation, and climate change. Ibarra has explored these questions at a global level through his design research, as the founder of Studio José Ibarra, as well as through his academic writing. In 2022, Ibarra coedited a volume of essays called Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis, and he is working on a forthcoming monograph titled Geoempathy.