Care and Counting: Building Multi-Species Surfaces

Article by Ariane Lourie Harrison, Co-founder of Harrison Atelier
The NXT Magazine: Transformations of Care

Humans are an extremely successful species, predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050. Most of the other 1.2 million named species on our planet, however, have been diminished in number, characterizing our present period as the sixth mass extinction. Loss of habitat is one of the major factors in non-human species decline, while human urbanization continues at a rapid pace. The Atlas for the End of the World maps the apocalyptic collapse of biodiversity in the wake of urbanization and industrial agriculture. So does the Map of Life, which documents the impact of urban land expansion projected to 2050 and the concomitant loss of species.

The design of novel habitats in human-dominated ecosystems – cities – has become critical, especially given the political and economic threats to the planet’s relatively few pristine wildlife preserves. Building spaces for urban biodiversity represents a crucial new area of research and action, connecting urban design, architecture, public art, and landscape design with reconciliation ecology, ecosystem services, and urban resilience policy.

Cities concentrate planetary resources: 55% of humans now live in cities, a number expected to rise to 68% by 2050.  By 2030, the world is projected to have 43 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants. Planetary urbanization is a defining fact of the 21st century. Yet cities also represent critical biodiversity preserves: Singapore and Berlin set examples in fostering urban biodiversity, while European projects such as the eight-city Biodiverse Cities program emphasize efforts to promote habitats for nonhumans. Green roofs, wildflower medians, pocket parks, and bioswales initiate urban biodiversity, but this needs to extend much further into the built environment. Imagine if a portion of skyscraper facades were allocated as habitats for other species.

Even allocating a few inches around the city’s 4.6 million windows could create 5.13 sq. kilometers of new habitat – an area significantly larger than Central Park (3.41 sq. km).¹ Allocating portions of south- and west-facing ground floors could create an additional 1 sq. km of novel habitat. 

The Pollinators Pavilion, Hudson NY
/ Harrison Atelier

Facades that Count

At Harrison Atelier, our work contributes building panels – what we term feral surfaces – that contain artificial habitats as well as monitoring systems to aid species assessment. A feral surface radically reimagines vertical building surfaces. While “feral” commonly refers to animals that are wild or untamed, the Latin root feralis means funerary, or belonging to the dead. A feral surface entwines these meanings, accounting for the fragile presence of endangered species while creating new, artificial habitats.

Insect populations, which represent about 80% of animal life on Earth, are collapsing so rapidly that scientists describe our era as one of “global insect apocalypse,” estimating a 75% decline over the last 50 years.² Yet insect loss can only be estimated: only 1% of the approximately 1 million known insect species (of an estimated 5.5 million possible species) has been formally assessed, despite their foundational role in the planetary food web. We depend on pollinating insects, yet we do not count them. We neither account for their presence nor their extinction in the design of our environment.

A distinguishing aspect of Harrison Atelier’s work is its enumerative quality and focus on monitoring systems. We take the idea of making design count literally. Our Pollinators Pavilion in Hudson, NY, contains 363 concrete panels, each with up to 50 nesting tubes – 18,150 potential nests. Feral Surfaces in Barcelona comprised 2,350 mycelium panels, each with a single nesting hole. The Hempcrete Habitat on Governors Island was built from 63 hempcrete blocks, 35 of which contained nesting tubes, creating approximately 2,400 nests. Most panels also include cameras and sensors that record non-invasively and continuously. Endoscopic cameras trained on nesting tubes operate for three hours daily, producing real-time video that both allows remote monitoring and contributes to an AI model capable of identifying native bees at a family level.³ While coarse, this marks the beginning of automated insect identification and helps address significant gaps in species assessment. In this way, design counts – by enumerating, by recognizing, by making visible our dependence on other species.

Maintaining What Counts

This issue of NXT centers on care and its transformations, which, in the American construction industry, manifests as the pragmatic practice of maintenance.

“Maintenance and repair are correctives to visions of the future and a present that neglects the inevitability of breakdown. Maintenance is work and labor, but it is also about forms of collective presence that fill in the cracks of a world in breakdown.”⁴ 

As Nate Millington describes, maintenance is a relational and everyday practice of repair that requires consistent dialogue with the materials and systems of a structure. A critical aspect of the practice involves observation. In Shannon Mattern’s words: “To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair – or simply, of taking care: connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices.”⁵ Maintenance requires designed and dedicated space.

For Mierle Ukeles, who spent 39 years as unpaid artist-in-residence at
New York City’s Department of Sanitation, maintenance is radical,
political, and ecological. Her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art highlights the tension between the “perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species” and its practice: “Maintenance is a drag: it takes all the fucking time, the mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.”⁶ Her manifesto concludes with Earth Maintenance, an ambitious proposal to daily treat, rehabilitate, and recycle: “the contents of one sanitation truck,” “polluted air,” “polluted Hudson River water,” and “ravaged land.”

Her 1976 collaboration with 300 sanitation workers at the Whitney Museum, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, resulted in a photographic record of unseen labor. It was prescient in registering the need to document the invisible work that sustains our cultural systems.

Maintenance work itself has a feral sensibility: it deals with breakdown, decay, and, in some sense, death. It is intensely material, confronting the inevitable accumulation of matter that can transform the familiar into a wilderness of junk. HVAC systems, which allow us to breathe indoors and cool us amidst climbing urban temperatures, are among the most urgently maintenance-dependent infrastructures. Yet buildings themselves could also be reimagined as infrastructures for maintaining planetary biodiversity – through monitoring.

The feral surfaces developed at Harrison Atelier integrate such spaces for maintenance. For the Pollinators Pavilion in Hudson, Ductal panels house nesting tubes within mesh-capped PVC pipes with air holes. Each PVC container, affixed to a cement panel, holds 152 mm-long nesting tubes (three to six native bee egg cells) of varying diameters, made of cardboard, paper, reed, and bamboo. Such detail reflects the work of maintenance: Is there airflow? Is it protected? Can it be cleaned?

A second type of maintenance occurs at the regional scale but contributes globally to biodiversity-support efforts. Each panel is equipped with cameras, sensors, and microprocessors, powered to operate six hours per day, collecting 1,000 images daily per camera (three pictures per minute). These images feed a database and AI model (supported by Microsoft’s AI for Earth Program), trained to automate bee identification to genus level as a no-kill method of addressing data gaps on native pollinators. Maintenance with machine intelligence can become cost-effective in the long hours of observation. Observation through distributed sensing becomes part of species maintenance, and its architecture helps, in Mattern’s terms, connect, mend, and amplify a planetary fabric.

Automated labor is controversial in its potential disruption of human labor in the construction industry, but imagine maintenance expanding to include care for the systems that monitor urban biodiversity. Applied across New York’s thousands of miles of building surfaces, we might agree: there is transformative and caring work for all.

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ARIANE LOURIE HARRISON

Architect, educator, and co-founder of Harrison Atelier, she reimagines architecture as shared habitat. With degrees from Princeton, Columbia, and NYU, and teaching roles at Pratt, Yale, and Penn, Harrison explores how design for multiple species can foster ecological care and cohabitation.