Year
2025Description
This series of pencil drawings illustrates scenarios of multispecies cohabitation, both in domestic settings and in the broader built environment.
Credits
Drawings by Joyce Hwang.
Commissioned by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum for its book, MAKING HOME: BELONGING, MEMORY, UTOPIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY (MIT Press), edited by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina L. De León, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson.
MORE THAN 100 SPECIES IN A HOME
There are more than 100 species present in most US homes. While humans do see and acknowledge a range of animals in the home – from beloved pets to so-called pests-- human dwellings host a much richer ecosystem of species, beyond what we can typically sense – from carpet beetles, to silverfish, and book lice.
COINCIDENTAL SHELTER
“Put up birdhouses and bird feeders!”… “Put up more bat houses!”…“Install more insect hotels!”… – these are familiar mantras from humans who acknowledge the animals that dwell in urbanized areas. But how much do we acknowledge that the structures we build for ourselves often also serve as shelters and homes for animals too? Many species are already synanthropic; in other words, they rely on almost entirely on human-built conditions in making their homes.
DWELLINGS FOR SPECIES
The idea of building structures for animals is not new. Civic buildings in the Ottoman Empire included birdhouses as part of their facades. Towers to house wild? pigeons were built in 16th century Iran as tools to collect guano as fertilizers for farmers. In 1911, Dr. Charles Campbell built a 30-foot tower for bats in San Antonio, as part of an experiment to combat malaria.
WELCOMING OUR NEIGHBORS
The planet is experiencing unprecedented biodiversity loss. In 2022, the Living Planet Index has reported a decline of approximately 69% since 1970 in monitored wildlife populations around the world. As humans begin to realize the precarious status of our fellow inhabitants of Planet Earth, we can adapt our dwellings to respect our connections with nonhuman neighbors and community members.
CITY AS HOME
If the idea of home can be defined by a sense of belonging, which species actually belong in our cities? We know that cities are hospitable to some and not others. For many species (including fauna and flora), urbanization results in a loss of their homes and a rupturing of habitat continuity. How might we adapt our built environments to truly create a sense of belonging for our multispecies communities? We must recognize the animals that already live among us as part of our shared world, and acknowledge that it is we who are guests when we build our homes among theirs.
