Toward an Interspecies Architecture: Exploring the Building Envelope as a Site of Avian-Human Coexistence

Abstract

This thesis argues that the building envelope can be reconceived as a spatial and ecological interface that actively supports avian-human coexistence. While existing scholarship on birds and architecture tends to frame buildings as hazards to be mitigated or only focuses on a broader urban scale, the architectural potential of the envelope for supporting bird life remains underexamined. Drawing on historical precedents, cultural analysis, and contemporary case studies, this thesis positions the envelope not as a thin boundary, but as a thickened, inhabitable system capable of accommodating nonhuman life. The first chapter analyzes pigeon towers and Ottoman bird palaces, and explores birds’ incidental occupation of historic facades, to demonstrate that birds have long been integrated into the built environment. The second chapter examines the cultural and architectural conditions that have led to the contemporary exclusion of birds, linking sealed building envelopes and bird-deterrence technologies to broader Western frameworks of human-nature separation and control. In response, it proposes a conceptual shift toward understanding cities as ecological habitats and buildings as participants in dynamic environmental systems. The third chapter analyzes recent architectural projects that engage birds at the scale of the envelope, identifying a range of interrelated spatial, material, ecological, and formal strategies for offering birds spaces of nesting and refuge. The thesis ultimately demonstrates that small, repeatable interventions in the building envelope can produce significant spatial capacity for avian life, both supporting bird populations and enriching human experience. By reframing the facade as a site of coexistence rather than exclusion, this work contributes to a broader rethinking of architecture as an interspecies practice.