RICHARD FADOK

My second book project asks how architects are grappling with biodiversity loss through aesthetic, epistemic, and technical experiments with multispecies design. As planetary forces of habitat destruction disrupt the migration routes of animals and disturb their territories for hunting, mating, and nesting, some architects and landscape architects have proposed designing artificial structures that intentionally accommodate lifeforms and forms of life that are other-than-human – a profound departure from architecture’s long-standing anthropocentrism. Syntopia builds on fieldwork in architecture schools, professional studios, and small- and large-scale installations around the United States to analyze how their ethological consideration of nonhuman subjectivities activates the built environment as an ethical site of human-animal relationship. By thinking with these architects through the shifting material-semiotics of glass windows, brick masonry, and other technologies of co-habitation, this project aims to contribute a multispecies phenomenology of architecture’s specific affordances, and dysaffordances, to interdisciplinary conversations around space as a system of power. In particular, it proposes the concept of “syntopia” to diagram how design shapes the more-than-human socialities of violence, kinship, and the pursuit of justice.

To date, I have published a short essay about syntopia in the Multispecies Lexicon (Berggruen Institute), and I am currently writing a book chapter on bird-window collisions for the edited volume Urban Animalia as well as an article on birdhouse exhibitions for the public humanities journal Noema. I have also presented my findings to colleagues at the 2023 meeting for the American Anthropological Association and the 2021, 2023, and 2024 meetings for the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Over the summer of 2024, CTV London and the Democrat & Chronicle profiled my applied anthropological research on bird-window collisions.