Archinect - News

This modern backyard bat house raises awareness on a natural form of pest control and bat conservation

2018-10-26T16:25:00-04:00

In response to the increasing number of mosquitoes and other pesky insects that climate change is bringing about, BatBnB is one company that wants people to be less reliant on harmful chemicals and pay attention to a more natural form of pest control: Bats!

Co-founded by Harrison Broadhurst (an architectural designer at Nomi Design) and Christopher Rännefors (a Sales & Operations Manager at Google Fiber), BatBnB designs stylish, bat expert-approved houses that mimic bats' natural habitat and provide them with a safe environment to sleep, stay, and raise their pups. With these houses, Broadhurst and Rännefors want to show that bats aren't the filthy blood-thirsty pests many people assume they are. In fact, bats can eat thousands of insects in one night, making them a better form of pest control.

Image via BatBnB.

Made from rot-resistant cedar, the BatBnB currently comes in three sleek designs and can be installed on a house, barn, pole, or tree. It c...

Scientists discover "Octlantis", an underwater city engineered by octopuses

2017-09-20T15:02:00-04:00

The octopuses didn’t just drift toward the same secure-looking outcroppings, though. Once there, they built piles out of shells from scallops, clams, and other animals they ate, then sculpted the piles into dens, “making these octopuses true environmental engineers,”

Scientists have found a new example of animal architecture, this time a city made by usually solitary octopuses. Named Octlantis, this underwater city is engineered by a group of 15 octopuses. Octopuses are known to be builders of their own habitat but, until now, had not be discovered to live in groups. Researchers observed the animals "congregating, communicating, dwelling together, and even evicting each other from dens."

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tomás Saraceno's spiders

2015-10-07T13:10:00-04:00

For the first few seconds you’re blind in the darkness. Then a reflex forces your pupils wider and your photoreceptor rod cells become more sensitive, sending a neural signal that alerts you to four glowing cubes that seem to be floating in mid-air in front of your body. It takes another few seconds for the glow to connect to its source, illuminate the supports of the plexiglass boxes, and finally render their content legible: a series of startlingly-complex and impossibly-delicate spiderwebs.

Here drawing back the curtain doesn’t destroy the magic. Quite to the contrary, Tomás Saraceno’s collaboration with various arachnids for the first Chicago Architecture Biennial has a power that extends beyond some mere trick of the light and runs deeper than a one-liner about non-human construction. It's a reprise of a project he's exhibited before, notably at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, but within an architectural context it conjures a particular significance.

The Argentine-born, Berlin-based Sara...

(Un)natural Architectures: Scorpion Design Temperature-Controlled Burrows

2014-07-03T19:28:00-04:00

Scientists have discovered that scorpions design their burrows to include both hot and cold spots. A long platform provides a sunny place to warm up before they hunt, whilst a humid chamber acts as a cool refuge during the heat of the day.

This recent discovery of scorpion architecture adds to a sizeable list of impressive non-human architecture.

Anthills consist of a complex network of paths. Comparative to the size of an individual ant, these structures are mega-skyscrapers.

Likewise, termites build huge structures that have been dubbed "cathedrals." Reaching up to 6m high or more, termite cathedrals are clustered in large arrays that cover whole landscapes.

This complex web of branches was built by the vogelkop gardener bowerbird. In direct refutation of the "less is more" aesthetic exemplified by both ants and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, these birds embellish their structures with any bright things they can find.

Primates, including humans, are probably the most avid builders. For example, from an early age, orangutans learn to design and construct elaborately woven nests high in trees.

Far from trivial – and humor aside –, studying animal architectures helps destabilize the normative understanding of architecture as a...

Animalistic Architecture

2012-10-10T10:33:00-04:00

We’ve previously looked at buildings designed to look like other things (care to live in a giant conch shell, anyone?), as well as crazy structures shaped like fruit (a roundup surprisingly dominated by oranges and tomatoes). But a post over on MetaFilter got us thinking about the zoological forms that buildings occasionally take on.

Winners of URBAN ANIMAL: 2012 Animal Architecture Awards

2012-09-06T19:10:00-04:00

Ned Dodington, founder of AnimalArchitecture.org, today announced the winners of the 2012 Animal Architecture Awards. This year's competition, titled "URBAN ANIMAL", called for designs that reshape, expand and redefine the context of urban thought and space while keeping in mind the needs (and possible benefits) of synanthropic species — wild animals that “live near, and benefit from, an association with humans and the somewhat artificial habitats that humans create around them”.

See also: Bat Cloud, the top award winner, previously in the Archinect News.

Animal Architecture Awards 2011 - The Winners

2011-08-15T13:53:08-04:00

The winning entries for the 2011 Animal Architecture Awards have just been announced. Now in its third year, the award contest "All Creatures Great & Small" invited critical and unpublished essays and projects to address how architecture can mediate and encourage multiple new ways of species learning and benefiting from each other - or as the organizers call it, to illustrate cospecies coshaping.