Announcing: Contributing Editor, Amy Haigh
We are very pleased to welcome Amy Haigh to the Expanded Environment team. Over the next several weeks…
Other Coworkers: Animals in the Workplace
History would suggest that a coworking relationship between humans and nonhumans is rarely equal and is typically characterized by subjugation, sadness, and a controlled population expansion of “useful” species. GBHB demonstrates that another more equitable, more beneficial, more respectful cross-species coworking environment is possible.
Cultural Practices Shaping Urban Biodiversity
The public square at Utpal Dutta Sarani enables an intensified feeding mechanism that spatially restrains foraging activities of an exploding pigeon population, preventing destructive impacts on urban nature.
Art-value of Biological Growth on Buildings
The art value of the co-created landscape cannot be ignored. The biological growth elevates the value of the wall into that of a unique sculpture.
An Enquiry into Production of Public Sculptures of Animals in Calcutta
As we are able to replicate the natural world in a synthetic medium, it becomes important to question the processes that lead to the existence of the animal sculptures.
Wild Growth in Cities as a Rare Resource
A tour of the old city of Calcutta reveals that while biological growth can threaten to destroy buildings' structures, conservation and management of growth can also enhance the age-value and identity of the city.
Cities: Home for Wildlife, Lacking Wilderness
If cities can be programmed with the character of wilderness, the urban can draw benefits of wonderment, motion, colour and interaction.
A Mongoose Family Visits Home
It was February 7 2018, when animal screams outside my bedroom door woke me up in the middle of the night.
Announcing: Contributing Editor, Amartya Deb
We are happy to introduce our newest contributing editor to the Expanded Environment - Amartya Deb. Amartya comes to us from India often writing from locations in Dehli, Calcutta, Bangladesh and elsewhere.
Companion Species
Today’s cities, not only Western but cities in general, have almost no animal life in their cores, and if they do, it is strongly curtailed.
Object Relations; Part 1
Our lives are inundated by a growing presence of things. How we manage and relate to these objects, these piles and piles of things, and better understand their complex realities is of serious importance...
On Resiliency; Part 2
Previously, I had outlined thoughts about current happenings and the implications of resilience to enframe not only human but non-human subjectivity into a state-sanctioned political apparatus. I’m interested to add two other voices to this discussion - Timothy Morton and Tim Ingold.
Beastly Designs
Zoos are strange, wondrous and beguiling institutions. They are instructive and detrimental, compassionate and cruel, culturally specific but universally appealing and architecturally unlike any other construction.
UrbAnimals
What was lost along with the disappearance of animal life in urban centers? Clearly there were problems with the 18th and 19th century modes of urban animal life but surely there were benefits. How can we learn from past periods of beastly cohabitation? I think it would makes us all the more human.
On Resiliency; Part 1
Recent articles published by Ross Exo Adams, Bruce Braun, and Marc Neocleous, in response to two major works on resilient design, the Rising Current's show at MoMA in 2010 and the more recent Rebuild By Design show illustrate that "resilience", is not necessarily the all-positive, progressive and knowledgeable term that I had once embraced.
Anthro-Eccentric Practice
An anthro-eccentric practice, on the other hand, if that were possible (the jury’s out on this) would reshape the role of the human before it reshaped the environment. It would consider impacts of changes in the environment from a variety of perspectives. It would reinforce living in the world, rather on the world.
The Cross-Species Design Imperative
The cross-species design imperative, first and foremost is a logical next step in the larger environmental movement. After decades of conserving energy and preserving environments, The Expanded Environment invites designers to become pro-active, shifting language from mere “conservation” and “responsibility” to "engaging" and "activating" those environments and the biological agents within them.
OpEd: More scenes like this
Twice a week I slide open the glass door to our outdoor patio and refill a hardware store bird feeder with bird seed. The package for the bird seed says “Attracts up to 2x more Finches” but we never see anything other than mourning doves and the occasional mocking bird. It makes no matter to me, my wife or the cat, especially the cat.
Being and Architecture
Rather than developing a robust theory or practice in architecture based on an inclusive attitude towards biology we have simply continued to reinscribe and strengthen anthropocentric ideas about the separation of “Man and Nature.”