Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us

(Hardback)

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A provocative call for architects to remember and embrace the nonhuman lives that share our spaces.

A spider spinning its web in a dark corner. Wasps building a nest under a roof. Theres hardly any part of the built environment that cant be inhabited by nonhumans, and yet we are extremely selective about which animals we keep in or out. This book imagines new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human and asks how we might design with animals and the other lives that share our spaces in mind. Animal Architecture is a provocative exploration of how to think about building in a world where humans and other animals are already entangled, whether we acknowledge it or not.

'Our planet teems with an astonishing variety of forms of intelligent life. Yet the ambition of architecture to put the human house in order has contrived to shut them out, forcing them to find room in the cracks where buildings fall apart. Could an architecture of astonishment, open to flights of imagination freed from the rigor of reason, offer greater hope for future conviviality Paul Dobraszczyk thinks so, and has amassed a wealth of examples, from every corner of the animal kingdom, to prove it.' Tim Ingold, author of Being Alive, The Perception of the Environment and Anthropology: Why It Matters

'An urgent book for anyone who designs, builds, or even just inhabits human architecture. Termites to foxes, rats to bees, salmon to swallowswe have much to learn from their genius strategies to 'house' themselves. More importantly we're invited to reconsider ways we might accommodate them. Dobraszczyk is asking us to fundamentally re-imagine the way we make spaces, structures, and cities, not exclusively for humans, but as realms for inter-species cohabitation, actively welcoming them into our lives. Or inviting ourselves into theirs' Fritz Haeg, artist

Reviews

'This book upends our thinking about architecture. From Ninja Turtles through beaver dams and designer doghouses to the design of zoos, Dobraszczyk asks us to consider architecture from the perspectives of species other than ourselves, and, in doing so, to develop spaces more entangled with this thing we call nature. This could be a roadmap to escape our age of mass extinction and climate emergency.' Tom Dyckhoff, historian, writer and broadcaster

Author Bio

Paul Dobraszczyk is a writer and a teaching fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He is the author of Future Cities (Reaktion, 2019) and co-editor of Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (Reaktion, 2016).