Ecological Restoration of Urban Spaces
Designing for more than Humans investigates how architecture can actively support biodiversity by re-centering design around non-human life and ecological relationships. The seminar challenges human-centered design paradigms, treating architecture as one element within broader ecosystems where plants, animals, materials, and environmental forces hold equal value. Through theoretical reflection and design experimentation, students explore strategies such as rewilding, designed ecologies, and spatial redistribution of human activity to promote ecological stewardship and multispecies coexistence.
How can architecture lead to greater biodiversity?
Even extremely light and minimal intervention architectures have a net negative impact on ecology when considering the disruption to fragile relationships which they cause within natural habitats, and this net negative is exacerbated with human occupation and activity. Types of ecological loss that result from human disturbance of natural environments include alteration of natural species composition and distribution, reduction of biological genetic diversity due to fragmentation of natural landscapes and general loss of non-human life due to inhospitable conditions.
In order to bring balance to the environmental impact of development, the future of design must view architecture not as a focal point, but as an element, interrelated to other elements in an ecosystem. In this paradigm, all actors have equal value: a tree, a column, a bird, a light; and rationality centers on forming new relationships and focusing on relational systems. As Junya Ishigami notes in Another Scale of Architecture:
“Spaces are born out of the relationship between architecture and non-architecture elements. A building is no more than one of the many conditions that make up myriad environments. The extent to which architecture and other things can be rendered equivalent is the key to expanding the possibilities of architecture.”
In this seminar course, students will explore how to place non-human life in the focal point of design for urban spaces, characterized by interventions that renaturalize spaces of human activity and puncture them with wild elements, expanding the scope of architectural design to emphasize ecological stewardship over human comfort. This central objective encompasses a range of investigative approaches, including:
At course completion the student will:
Case Study of Ecological Restoration, Human Presence and Design of Co-Existence Introduction Fish Tail Park is located in the center of Nanchang City, a historic city in southeastern China with approximately 6.6 million residents, has experienced rapid urban growth and high-tech industrial expansion along the Gan River. Is a large-scale ecological restoration project designed by … Read more
Oerliker Park in Zürich, Switzerland is not a natural forest that slowly emerged over time. It is a designed urban ecology: structured, calculated, and deliberately designed among buildings and former industrial sites. Even though the park may read as “natural” with its trees, parks like Oerliker are often designed primarily around human use. But parks … Read more
This project investigates Parc del Centre del Poblenou through the lens of Designing for More than Humans. The park, although permeable and vegetated, is spatially structured around human circulation and programmed activity. As a result, human occupation is continuous and dominant, while non-human life remains fragmented and residual. Through rule-based speculation, the project tests how … Read more
The Brooklyn Bridge Park is located along the Brooklyn waterfront of the East River, between DUMBO and Atlantic Avenue, and it spans about 85 acres (0.34 km²), stretching roughly 2 kilometers along the shoreline. That alone makes it one of New York City’s most significant post-industrial waterfront transformations. The park was developed in phases between 2008 … Read more
Started off in 1504 as a Renaissance-era fortification system, designed to resist cannon warfare. Over the years, it has undergone many reconstructions, with the latest turning it into a managed heritage park in the early 2000s (Planted rows of trees) . Ecology has played an important role in each of its eras, as we’ll see … Read more
