Friday, May 10, 2024 9:00am to 4:00pm
About this Event
755 Library Road, Rochester, NY 14626
https://www.sas.rochester.edu/humanities/programs/humanities-project/badgering-architecturefinal.pdfPlanetary forces of habitat destruction, such as climate change, urban sprawl, and resource extraction, have profoundly reshaped the lives of many nonhuman animals, disrupting their migration routes and disturbing their hunting, mating, and nesting territories. Badgering Architecture will explore how some contemporary architects are responding to these dislocations through “multispecies design.” Traditionally, architecture has represented either a bulwark against animals or else, in the case of the zoo and the barn, as a mechanism for their instrumental use. On the contrary, recent explorations within multispecies design figure animals, not as threats or property, but as clients and co-designers, even neighbors. Thus a panoply of architectural technologies has emerged that invites urban wildlife to dwell alongside humans within the built environment, from “bird-safe” glass to habitable masonry, walls, and other artificial habitats.
This interdisciplinary symposium will bring together experts in architecture, landscape architecture, history, and anthropology to discuss how these endeavors are transforming cultural categories of space and species. Through a trio of panels on current practices, historical precedents, and pedagogical methods, this international group of participants will ask how multispecies design enacts new forms of human and animal relation. By “badgering” architecture – pestering the discipline’s orthodox orientation to humans – Badgering Architecture aims to deepen our understanding of the ways that space speciates, organizing the possibilities and impossibilities of co-habitation with other beings.
Invited speakers will include Joyce Hwang (University of Buffalo), Ned Dodington (Expanded Environment), Paul Dobraszczyk (University College London), Sean Weiss (The City College of New York), José Ibarra (University of Colorado, Denver), Roxi Thoren (The Pennsylvania State University), and Claire Zimmerman (University of Toronto).
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