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David Hill: As a young architect fresh out of Cornell, Joyce Hwang once had a client come to her with a rather shocking request. Could she incorporate into her building design window ledges that would keep birds out by electrocuting them?

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

David Hill: The profession's prevailing view of animals, that they were something to keep away from buildings, inspired Hwang to study the relationship between non-human species and design as a graduate student at Princeton. Her master's thesis project, called Zoo Lab, looked at speculative future habitats for animals in captivity, and it served as the launch point for her current explorations incorporating animal habitats into the built environment.

Today, Hwang is a professor in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning. She is also the director of Ants of the Prairie, an architectural practice that confronts both the pleasures and horrors of our contemporary ecologies through creative means. 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.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is David Hill, and on this episode, I'll be talking to Joyce Hwang about designing spaces for all creatures, human and otherwise.

Welcome, Professor Hwang. So, tell us how and when did you decide you wanted to be an architect?

Joyce Hwang: Well, when I was young, I was very interested in art. I loved drawing. I loved sculpture. I loved seeing art. I was interested in possibly becoming an art major. But at the same time, my parents were very much into the sciences. My dad is a doctor, my mother was a chemistry teacher, and they were very interested in having me perhaps pursue something more in the sciences. I decided to look at different options. I wasn't decided for the longest time, but when I went to visit architecture schools, among other schools, I really fell in love with what I saw in studios. There was a lot of creative energy. You could see people making things. At the same time, you could see spaces being developed. It wasn't just about built objects.

David Hill: And what was it that kind of led you to focus on multispecies design?

Joyce Hwang: I get this question a lot. A lot of people will ask me, ‘Well, did you grow up hiking, or were you outdoors a lot? Were you in the woods?’ And actually, it was quite different. I grew up in a suburban setting outside of Los Angeles in Orange County, and the kind of nature that I experienced as a kid was much more manicured. So my experience of being outside was perhaps being on a mowed lawn or looking at trimmed bushes, and so on.

So one of the things that happened when I was younger is that I would go outside and see, you know, different aberrations, I would say, in the landscape that, to me, felt very interesting. So a particular story is that my sister and I were outside looking in the yard, in these kind of topiary bushes, which were, you know, trimmed to this kind of very round shape, and we found a bird's nest in it. At the time, you know, I probably should have thought, oh, it's quite normal for a bird's nest to be in a bush. But because the garden was so manicured, it seemed strange to see this bird's nest in the bush.

So seeing these kind of aberrations and kind of unique moments in the landscape was very interesting to me as a kid. I liked seeing things that were out of place. Just seeing messiness in the yard was really fascinating to me. That probably started my interest in thinking about animals and non-humans in the environment.

David Hill: So who knew that a bird's nest as a child would sort of influence your professional direction years later.

Joyce Hwang: I certainly did not think that at the time [laughs]. I think because I was interested in art and sculpture and built things, at the time I never really associated that with nature, or what we think of as nature. At that time, those were completely separate in my mind. But later on, you know, as I started experiencing different places, the intersections between living beings and the built environment became more apparent.

David Hill: So, Joyce, why is it important to design for other species, not just humans? What's at stake here, and what do we lose by not doing this?

Joyce Hwang: Well, I think as humans, we have to understand that we're not the only species on the planet, that we share Earth with many, many other species, and we have to understand how we can build in that context. Some folks might know that we're experiencing a biodiversity crisis at the moment. The Living Planet Index has reported that there's been a massive decline in monitored wildlife populations, a decline of over 70% between 1970 and 2020. So this is a major ecological issue that I think needs to be much more at the forefront of people's minds.

As architects, I think we need to be concerned that urbanization and building, just as acts in and of themselves, do produce some form of habitat loss because we are removing soil, we're disturbing the land. 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 that architects and humans in general have to face.

David Hill: Is this an issue that is on the minds of a lot of architects and designers today, or is there still, kind of, more work that needs to be done to address that?

Joyce Hwang: Certainly compared to when I was doing my thesis, it's much more at the forefront of folks’ minds now. Environmental advocacy, I think, is becoming just more kind of pronounced. It's amplified in many different spheres. But I think there's certainly a lot more work to be done.

David Hill: Now you've designed habitats for individual species like bats and bees. You've also created installations for multiple species, including humans, to enjoy at the same time. Your most recent example of this is something called the Pollinator Lounge. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?

Joyce Hwang: Yeah, the Pollinator Lounge is a project that was commissioned by Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It's essentially a cluster of public seating, an arrangement of seating for people to enjoy themselves. But at the same time, it also includes an integrated series of pollinator habitat boxes.

It was actually inspired and derived from a project that I did with my collaborator, Nerea Feliz, who's an architect and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. We together created a project called Multispecies Lounge in Toronto that basically was the same kind of idea of kind of a series of urban furnishings with habitat boxes above, but for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden version, Nerea and I decided to try to integrate student voices and student design into it as well, since both of us are educators.

So for Pollinator Lounge, rather than having us design every aspect of it, which is what happened in the Multispecies Lounge, we developed studio projects for our undergraduate students, respectively, at both institutions to create habitat boxes that would speak to the kind of habitats and resources of different pollinator species in the New York City area.

David Hill: What are some of the things the students did with their boxes?

Joyce Hwang: In our studio brief, we gave them a list of pollinator species that they had to research and develop spatial ideas for. So, for example, there was one group that developed a box that was about creating spaces that could collect water. The moths that they were looking at had extremely long tongues, and so they created these, like, really deep pockets where a long tongue could go in and sort of lap up water. Many projects were based on different kinds of solitary bees, which tend to nest in small cavities and holes of various sizes, you know, maybe a millimeter to, you know, one centimeter. So students were using, you know, different-sized holes to kind of create patterns in their boxes.

Another condition that we gave the students, or another prompt that we gave the students, was for them to use UV reflective or black light paint to decorate the boxes, in addition to regular white paint. And the reason for this is because insects, pollinators, and birds as well, see UV light, whereas humans cannot. So we were interested in having the students create a design that would be visible to insects and birds in a different way than they would be for humans. So if a human looked at it, it would see one pattern, but if a bird looked at it, they would see another pattern. And you can, as a human being, you can walk up to the box and use a black light flashlight to reveal what this hidden pattern is.

David Hill: And this is on UB’s South Campus, correct?

Joyce Hwang: Right, yes. So the Pollinator Lounge was relocated to UB. It's on South Campus, right next to Diefendorf.

David Hill: Many of your projects exist outside as urban habitats, but there are apparently about 3000 species of animals across the world that live inside of our homes and buildings. Are you proposing that architects design human homes and buildings in a way that's more inclusive of those animals? And what would that look like?

Joyce Hwang: Well, absolutely. I think that, currently, buildings are designed in a way where they basically ignore the presence of animals in the environment. And I think trying to think about how a building might be more accommodating to nearby, you know, community species is really important.

So one way to think about this is to think about the exterior of a building and whether or not it can be designed in such a way where there could be spaces for animals to potentially hide or take shelter. This is not to say to bring animals inside buildings, or to, you know, bring animals or bats inside attics. That's not what I'm suggesting at all. But it's about creating kind of a buffer zone outside of a building where spaces can be more suitable for animal habitat.

So that's one idea. Another thing that I've been thinking about, too, is how we might design just our backyards or spaces outside of buildings. I think oftentimes we think of backyards as places with trees, you know, and gardens, and the trees might provide shade and so on, but we don't think about the trees also as animal habitat. And so, how do we kind of choreograph the way we design our backyards to more carefully incorporate animals into the environment?

One of the things I'm considering right now, actually is that I recently closed on a home in Elmwood Village, and the property actually has a much larger backyard space than the built house itself. So my partner and I are looking at, you know, renovating the house itself, but we're also looking at how we're going to design this backyard. We want to build a deck, but we also want to make sure that the backyard is welcoming for wildlife and animals without having, you know, their lives necessarily intersect disruptively with ours.

David Hill: Now, what are some easy things that people can do at their own properties?

Joyce Hwang: Well, of course, there are certain things you can buy, like bat houses and bird houses, but there's also a number of ways that you can use simple materials. So, for example, one way to kind of accommodate smaller terrestrial species is to just put a pile of stones in your backyard. The small spaces between stones tend to be places where little animals might want to hide.

One thing I read about once is that somebody took tennis balls and cut them apart so that they had a little opening so that mice could live in them. And I think that's actually a pretty appropriate way to help provide shelter for mice and other smaller animals. Another potential is to take pieces of wood, rotting logs, and kind of throw them in your backyard. That tends to be really great habitat for insects and other small species.

David Hill: I'm sensing that you must have a story of an animal that you've befriended at a previous house or property.

Joyce Hwang: Yeah, I do. So I had a house back in 2008 on Lancaster Avenue in Buffalo, also in Elmwood Village, and there was a giant tree in the backyard with a lot of cavities in it. My ex-husband and I actually realized that a raccoon was living in that tree. And the raccoon was wonderful. We would see the raccoon, you know, when we were outside grilling or something, the raccoon would sort of walk across the backyard. It was just kind of going about its own thing. And so I think kind of understanding that there's a space for the raccoon to live, um, peacefully, was something that I kind of realized at that time, and to not be afraid of having a raccoon in the backyard.

David Hill: So why do you think it is that people are so averse to the species that have adapted to our environments, even the ones who live outside, like raccoons and pigeons? Is it the species themselves, or is it because they're just too close to us?

Joyce Hwang: Well, I think it's definitely that they're too close to us. We tend to associate species like rats and pigeons with trash and lack of maintenance now, but that's not always the case. In 16^th-century Iran, there were pigeon towers built to try to attract pigeons so that farmers could cultivate pigeon guano for fertilizer. I think nowadays we associate certain animals, certain urban animals in particular, with trash, and we see them as, you know, being too close to us.

David Hill: If you could design a structure for any animal in the world, one that you haven't already designed something for, what would it be? And why?

Joyce Hwang: This is the hardest question ever. So I mentioned before that there was this raccoon in our backyard. Before moving to Buffalo, I hadn't really thought about raccoons that much, but now, being here and having seen raccoons, you know, in well-loved neighborhoods—and so not in areas that lack maintenance but in areas with a lot of care—has kind of shifted my perception of them. I think it's also interesting that Toronto, our northern neighbor, is known as the raccoon capital of North America. And you know, they've spent something like, you know, millions of dollars trying to renovate their trash system or their garbage bins to keep raccoons out. But it's not working, apparently. So, you know, how do we kind of think about this in a different way?

David Hill: How do you hope to inspire future designers and architecture students to really think about a lot of these issues that you've been studying?

Joyce Hwang: One of the things that I try to do in in teaching architecture students is to introduce this idea of the specific environment of animals. Oftentimes in architecture, we're only thinking about the environment of humans and what's comfortable to us, but if we look through the lens of different species, how can we try to kind of see what their lives might be like? Animals, just like humans, want shelter. They want resources. They need ways to live. We need animals to live. And so how to kind of, you know, think about the kind of bigger picture of the planet, is something I always talk about with my students.

David Hill: What are a couple of projects that you are currently working on?

Joyce Hwang: So I'm on sabbatical right now, and I'll be going to Taiwan in a few days, which I'm excited about. I will be conducting a workshop for undergraduate students at the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan. We'll be looking at biodiversity, urban habitat issues, and potentially doing a kind of design-build installation. I will also be working with some faculty there on thinking about biodiversity and facade design.

David Hill: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us, Professor Hwang. It’s been really fascinating, and I think we'll all kind of look at animals in a slightly different way now when we see them on the streets or in our yards.

Joyce Hwang: Thank you, David.