Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us

Description

The spider spinning its web in a dark corner; wasps building a nest under a roof: there is hardly any part of the built environment that can't be inhabited by nonhumans, and yet we are extremely selective as to which animals we allow in or keep out. This book considers many different animals, opening up new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human. Looking closely at how animals produce spaces for themselves, Paul Dobraszczyk asks what we might require in order to design with animals and become more attuned to the other lifeforms that already use our structures. Animal Architecture is a provocative exploration of building in a world where humans and other animals are already entangled, whether we acknowledge it or not.

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).

'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