Architecture for Avians

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Written by guest blogger Adé Ben-Salahuddin

If I had to describe my relationship to Barbara Nasila in one word, “serendipitous” comes to mind. She and I met in early 2022, during the spring semester of her first year at the Yale School of Architecture. During our first outing, she told me she was working on a term assignment that required her to design a hypothetical pavilion in a local New Haven neighborhood, taking into account both the needs of the human community and the local bird life. It just so happened that the site she chose was a then-disused parking lot only half a block away from yours truly, a lifelong resident and developing birder, so you can imagine the conversation that stemmed from that mutual revelation.

In revisiting the topic in preparation for this piece, Barbara revealed to me that one of the original components of the assignment was to include a space to display a copy of John James Audubon’s influential book, The Birds of America. Little did we know that only three days later, the National Audubon Society would make the controversial decision to retain the name of a man who not only was a racist enslaver but also a scientific fraud whose aforementioned book is littered with examples of artistic plagiarism and even an entirely fictional species that he claimed to have discovered.

The following is an abridged version of our interview.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I'm currently a second year Masters of Architecture student at the Yale School of Architecture. I am originally from Kenya, born and raised. I did my undergrad at UC Berkeley, and then worked for about a year in Utah and then moved to Yale, and I've been here since then. 

You designed a pavilion in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood for a term assignment. Could you tell us about the project? 

So, we have four core studio [classes] in a span of two years, and this was the second core studio. We were supposed to design a pavilion for birds, people, and for this book, a Double Elephant Folio by Audubon. It's a really big book that is only turned once [per year] and it's exhibited at the Beinecke Library as of now. Not many copies of this book exist, but I think Yale has two. 

We were all given a choice to pick a site. I picked the Dixwell site because I personally am more focused on designing for Black and brown communities and I want to have more experience designing for these communities. It was an opportunity to kind of work with people who on some level look like me and feel like me. 

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What was the thought process for what you ended up designing?

My thought process is in many ways reflective of what kind of designer I'm trying to be. Acknowledging the intersectionality of the bodies we inhabit is very important for me, and designing for communities that I haven't necessarily grown up in is also something I'm trying to play around with and understand and question in many ways. So when choosing the Dixwell site, I had to take a step back and acknowledge that the idea of Blackness I have and inhabit is not necessarily the same as the idea of Blackness that I experience in the U.S. My experience with Blackness in many ways is very different because I did not grow up in the U.S., and in an architectural institution like Yale that is primarily white and has very Western and Eurocentric ideas about design and about engaging with communities that are not white – and, you know, rich – there's different ways in which I wanted to approach the project, and mostly I wanted to listen as opposed to impose my own ideas about what I thought this project had to be. 

So using this idea of, How do I engage with knowledge, practices, experiences, and legacies that are already existing in Dixwell?, I chose to talk to some people – who are maybe possibly in this room right now – to learn as much as I could. I went into a deep dive of unraveling the history: who had been there, and who is still there right now?  How are they engaging with this idea of environmentalism and conservationism? How are they engaging with birds? How are they engaging with nature? What I found in that discovery process – thanks to my very trusted resources – is that there is already an existing conversation about engaging birds into an urban living experience, so I was proposing this project that I didn't have to propose in many ways 'cause it already existed, and so I thought about my role in this project as more about amplifying existing voices and ideas about people really living with and within nature; as a mirroring of what's existing and what is past and present, and all of that combined. 

What did that end up looking like in terms of the actual design?

The site that I was specifically given was an intersection in Dixwell that was very contentious because it was known for being very accident prone and unsafe for pedestrians. My proposal was basically to supplant all this traffic, all this chaos, and instead put this kind of haven, this safe oasis – an urban oasis you may call it. It's pretty much a contemplative pavilion nested within a larger park-like public space to give a space for birds, for nature, for trees, so a very quiet space ensconced within an urban environment to give a place for all of these things to come together. 

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The idea is that you are able to commune around water, which is something that is pulling my own experience and background into the project. Water has very sacred connotations depending on which part of Africa and which culture you're in, and the idea of communing around water was very central to this project, and also a way to incorporate different types of birds. This is where my lack of bird knowledge will probably be very, very obvious, but the idea was to have a diverse typology of birds, so birds of air, birds of water, and have a space that can bring all of them together. 

The project is about bounding that experience within a very nested site.The boundaries are mostly created by trees, because trees allow a level of permeability within their solidity. That's a very architectural way of saying you can see and experience the different boundaries without having a solid block of wall. So you have a boundary of trees that is creating a safe haven for birds to come in and out, and the pavilion itself is permeable in the sense that there are openings for you to see through and enter, and there's openings for birds to enter and pass through, so the building itself is very open.

Another result of that project was acknowledging the labor that all these community organizations are already doing in Dixwell and have been doing for a long time, and to give them a space for that programming. So let's say the church wants to do a food drive and doesn't have enough space in its current building; it can expand that food drive into this park area so people can come and have a more open space to commune. This shared open public haven is a way for these organizations to understand that they all exist within this same space, they're all working towards the same goal, and they can start to use this spatial configuration to create all this programming to improve Dixwell on a socioeconomic and political level, but also on an environmentally conscious level. It's a very idealistic project. 

So, the Audubon book, I know you mentioned it. Why was that important to the original project, and where was – or wasn't – it in your design, and why?

I questioned what the role of the Audubon book was in my project. I understood the value of it, this object that is preserving what the birds of America have been, and what was lost to some extent but I couldn't resolve the ideals of the person from the book itself. It's a book that in many ways was trying to achieve something, but I always questioned if it was trying to achieve it for the right reasons. 

I felt like there were ways for that same message to be passed through this project without bringing this book that's very hard to manage and engage with. This pavilion was already doing and engaging with a lot, and I didn't feel like bringing [in] a book with a very anti-Black character [Audubon] who wouldn't necessarily have engaged with or cared about this community in the first place. 

I understand how [having the book] may have worked in certain other sites we were given but not necessarily in Dixwell, and so I chose not to create a space for the book  and instead create a space for the birds themselves instead of having to engage with this book that would give very limited access. Just imagine if you aren't an actual bird watcher – or even if you are – every time you come into this pavilion you're seeing the same page. Every single time. For a year. That as opposed to having a space for different birds to come in and out and then you get to experience how birds sound, how birds look, how birds feel – I mean, maybe not how they feel, please don't touch the birds – but it's just experiencing the relationship that this pavilion is trying to emphasize as opposed to the book. 

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So, what have you learned from doing this project? 

I learned a lot about birds, but I also learned a lot about respecting birds. Before this project I don't necessarily think I ever saw birds that much, which is interesting because they're all around us all the time, but they didn't feel like they were part of my everyday life. This project made me aware of them in a very special way, and it made me aware of how my own privilege as a designer can really impact birds – in some ways on a much more serious level. 

We got a tour of the Yale Peabody [Museum]'s archive of birds and they really emphasized how architecture is one of the biggest bird killers out there, so as a designer who is now aware of birds, I'm more conscious about any design choices that I make in the future [and] how they impact birds. Me not putting a bunch of tall glazing that's reflecting light is probably good for birds, but also it's good for creating a more livable experience for everyone else who doesn't have to deal with the glare, so I have learned to be more conscious of the environmental aspect of my design choices. 

There's also learning how to design in a community that doesn't have my similar background. They may look like me but I had to be very conscious of the fact that I'm Kenyan and my experience with Blackness is very different in America, so I had to acknowledge that and give space for voices that are not my own in this project. So learning how to listen to people that I'm working with and working for is something else I find was very valuable. 

Any closing thoughts?

This was really fun. Birds are really fun, and as a non-bird watcher I really enjoyed the experience of learning about and trying to understand the nuances of different bird species and just being conscious of how that difference is always conflated into one idea of what birds are. There's so much fun in understanding those differences and how that influences how you design for different types of birds. It was really fun.

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Adé Ben-Salahuddin started at Yale University as an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major and is currently pursuing a Bachelors in Biology Secondary Education w/ 7-12 Teaching Certification at Southern Connecticut State University. His interests include evolution, paleontology, and science communication and outreach. He has worked at the Yale Peabody Museum as both a collections assistant and tour guide and currently runs the YouTube channel Adasaur, focusing on prehistoric life and highlighting the diversity of the ancient past and the people who research it. 

_{All images by Barbara Nasila}