High Rise Animalia

_45856841_winning-design

A new project posted on the BBC yesterday caught our eye. The project proposes to install  a handful (the numbers are a bit unclear) of animal “high-rise” buildings along an old industrial canal in Leeds. The chap behind the project, 26-year-old Neil Oxlee, suggests that his “man-made trees” will provide habitats for bats, birds, butterflies, insects and even foxes. In short, acting like small eco-attractors for many other species. We love the idea, but there are a few obvious and some less obvious issues here.

The first, as an astute reader of the BBC noted on their own is: why not just plant trees? Sure there would be a time lag, but the cost would be much much lower and in fact the time it would take the tree may in fact step right in line with the time it takes a falcon to reclaim old territory. Plus there are all those added nutrients that come with a tree — rotting leaves and mulch and the like.

Secondly, and we shouldn’t be too hard on Oxlee, is that we would hope that an understanding of the eco-system around him would produce a form, or strategy a bit more complex than vertical moss-covered towers. We fully understand that ecological forces are somewhat blind to form (i.e. a fox cares very little about a cubic, or spherical house) but this, we believe is the challenge at hand. Keep up the good work Mr. Oxlee and let’s start to get the animal experts and biologists on call.

For more information see:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8079079.stm

You May Also Like
Read More

Objects Across Space and Time

Expanded Environments and the Objects Between Them The work of the Expanded Environment has tended to focus on…
Read More

Expanded Collaborations

This summer it has been our pleasure to collaborate with Ethan Meisler on a competition entry for ‘Primal…
Read More

The Urban Rookery

Rookery: a colony of breeding animals, generally birds. A rookery is generally reserved for a colony of gregarious…