| Feral Partnerships is a collaboration between James Powell, Beth Fisher Levine, Matthew Darmour-Paul, Enrico Brondelli di Brondello and Francesca Rausa. Their work offers new possibilities for building that considers the other-than-human. Their exhibition The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation opened at the Tin Shed Gallery this month, presenting stories of human and animal interdependence, framed by the architecture that hosts them. Based on case studies, they aim to inspire new ways of thinking about both professional and academic architectural standards, and how they can work with ecological and biodiversity loss. They kindly spoke to FOLLY about how their research started, the relationship between architecture and ecology, and new ways of thinking about the future practice of architecture. |
Feral Partnerships is a collaborative project, how did you come together and when did you decide to start the project?
Feral Partnerships came together while three of us - Beth Fisher Levine, James Powell and Matthew Darmour-Paul - were finishing our Masters degrees in Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London. We were all completing research projects that challenged architecture’s entanglement with biodiversity loss: James was investigating rewilding through the British planning system, and alternative forms of suburban development; Matthew was looking at the ‘Silicon Prairie’, a rewilded American midwest brought about by the shifting infrastructures from intensive agriculture to data; Beth was reimagining the design of harbours with the sensory worlds of dolphins in mind.
It was clear we all shared a deeper concern for other-than-human worlds in times of ecological breakdown, and that it should profoundly shift our ways of practicing, so it was a natural step to start a collaboration together. After taking up full-time jobs in architecture, we started working in earnest on speculative projects together in early 2020 and we were joined by Enrico Brondelli di Brondello and Francesca Rausa.
What was your entry point into the relationship between architecture and ecology?
One of our early collective realisations concerned the impact of the so-called Anthropocene in merging ecology and culture - and their spatial, propositional practices of conservation and architecture. Where in the past those practices operating on divergent ends of a city-wilderness spectrum, these distinctions have become much less tenable. Conservationists increasingly doubt the ability of nature reserve models to arrest global biodiversity loss, and can no longer ignore expanding human territories and infrastructures as sites of intervention in the interests of biodiversity. The breakdown of these spatial and disciplinary boundaries revealed worlds that the architectural profession was systematically excluding, operating as it does through a typically humanistic and anthropocentric lens.
One of our first projects together was to begin to gather a research archive of multispecies cohabitation, as a way to crystallise an approach to architecture and to begin to open up paths into the sorts of generous multispecies worlds that we are interested in. This began with an architectural analysis of farmhouses in order to identify the social and technological shifts that have led to the separation of humans and nonhuman animals in domestic spaces over time. The project has since grown to encompass a range of built structures from around the world that are designed or managed with multiple species in mind.
Your research has looked at range of architectural examples from bee boles to Tinian dovecotes. Would you be able to share a case study? One that was of particular interest, or offered a turning point in your research?
We really enjoyed discovering the Kabata in Harie, Japan. The town is located at the edge of an alluvial fan, along the shores of lake Biwa. Local residents are able to harness fresh spring water from confined groundwater upwells by simply hammering pipes into the ground and building structures around them. Although many towns around lake Biwa had similar systems, most have been replaced by municipal drinking water. Harie however still has more than a hundred houses with Kabata.
Kabata separate spring water into several concrete basins for different purposes under a wooden cabin. A first and smaller basin is used for cooling and rinsing: the temperature of ground water stays between 13 and 15 degrees Celsius through the year - in summer people store tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelons in the water, or use it to cool hot tea. A second basin is used to wash pans or other utensils. Most households have carp or other fish, which once used to be eaten and are now kept as “cleaners” that eat leftover food scraps washed off the pans.
The Kabata users rely on the carp, as well as on other human residents, to ensure that the water remains clean and usable; the community has recently agreed to avoid the use of harsh cleaning chemicals, to protect the carp and the potability of the water. This delicate commonality embedded in the Kabata system has thus kept the residents of Harie deeply attuned to the health of their local ecology, where such attentiveness might have been lost elsewhere. This underlined the idea of multispecies cohabitation as a collective endeavour, of which architecture is only a catalyst; it requires ongoing commitment and collaboration between communities of humans and other-than-humans. We realised that the work would be as much about stories as about architectures, and this promoted the role of narrative in the way we analysed and represented the work.
Are there transferable ideas from these case studies that can inform architecture today? To refocus building in a way which looks not only at technological solutions to build sustainably, but methods which include biodiversity.
We see the case studies as examples of more empathic ways of being in the world and in shared built environments. Each makes human interdependence with other species more evident, reframing ecological commitments as fruitful collaborations with other-than-humans, making them active stakeholders in the production of space as well as the protocols that define it.
Importantly, the case studies are non transferable - they can't just be lifted and applied in other contexts. At best, they constitute what Anna Tsing might call a meaningful 'rush of stories' that elicit more stories. The research framework must change as the context changes - which is great news for ecology but bad news for trying to make a 'science' of testable hypotheses out of the topic. And we should clarify that we are not interested here in learning from nature in order to apply clever technological solutions to biodiversity loss. Rather, the success of each case study relies on a complex set of environmental and cultural systems that have in turn shaped an architectural form. Through this understanding we can begin to enshrine alternative, more expansive modes of architectural practice.
Your exhibition The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation opens this month, at the Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney. What do you want visitors to take away from the show?
We would like the exhibition to platform a difficult discussion around the many non-human lives that make human life possible, showing what is at stake in the continued production of a spatial separation between species. Our research agenda is hopeful. By piecing together an alternative and joyful constellation of meaningful references, we would like visitors to reimagine the way in which we establish relationships with other than human species. Even if each case study does not provide a singular blueprint for success, we hope that their episodic power and powerful stories will inspire people to reflect upon and reimagine the forms of multispecies commitment that sustain their own spaces and lives.
Has the group designed their own Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation?
We have begun to work on speculative ideas and project applications together, which we are all eager to make come to life ‘in the field’. Watch this space, or get in touch :)