Urban attraction
University of Houston, 2021.
Humans and animals are fundamentally equals. There is a need to survive that includes feeding, defending, and supporting oneself in every species identified solution. Humans have the capability to go beyond most insects, mammals, and reptiles. The use of tools that has led to the advancement of our species has brought forth an entire reshaping of the earth, that has not only affected modern humans and expected ways of life but has affected our co-habitation with other living beings.
Our ability to transform our surroundings and use our intellect to advance our species, by ways of homeostasis, aesthetics, and emotional influence, has in turn effected the original path of the earth and the equality of those who inhabit it. The overuse of regional materials has long occurred before even the industrial revolution, carving out space and changing the landscape through urbanization, and clearing original flora and fauna for more manufactured dwellings and built needs for humankind. As technology advanced into the industrial revolution, urban sprawl engulfed more regional ecosystems. The accumulation of not only amenities to human lifestyles through industrial production begins to effect natural resources and populations and the byproducts of these process effects how the world can protect us from the larger natural processes outside of our atmosphere.
There is interest in the value of natural ecology in urban spaces, and as many projects approach these solutions as ways to benefit a species or population, while still engaging in traditional building practices, I believe there is enough similarity in the architecture of animals and humans that there can be solutions in how they involve each other. Through exploration of traditional and contemporary building practices, and phycological research of human relationships to a specific species population in a regional area, as well as the anatomical and phycological behavior of a species, I am looking to uncover a built environment solution to both parties.
Opportunity for large scale intervention will be approached through small infrastructural changes. To accommodate varieties of ecosystems, the introduction of a new building code will appeal to the variations across ecosystems and regional specifications. This will instill a longterm solution to both new construction and retrofitting for existing and planned urban development. Research will identify populations and species that will opportunistically be introduced into the cityscape on a building scale, that will translate along the urban datum, and ultimately redefine the scale of human in the built environment.
