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Architecture for Avians
Designing a space for a community to interact with birds.
© Courtesy of Barbara Nasila
During her first year at the Yale School of Architecture, Kenyan graduate student Barbara Nasila was tasked to design a hypothetical outdoor pavilion in a local neighborhood called Dixwell, featuring an original copy of the enslaver John James Audubon’s book, The Birds of America. As Barbara got to know Dixwell, she realized that there was already an existing conversation about birds in the community. She designed an urban oasis with bird habitat and space for community groups — but she left out The Birds of America, feeling that Audubon wouldn’t have cared about this project.
BirdNote®
Architecture for Avians
Written by Adé Ben-Salahuddin
This is BirdNote.
During her first year at the Yale School of Architecture, Kenyan graduate student Barbara Nasila was tasked to design a hypothetical outdoor pavilion in a local neighborhood called Dixwell, with an original copy of the enslaver John James Audubon’s book, The Birds of America, as its centerpiece. It’s a book so large that its pages are only turned once a year.
Barbara Nasila: I picked the Dixwell site because I personally am more focused on designing for Black and brown communities and it was an opportunity to work with people that, on some level, look like me and feel like me.
Barbara got to work learning about the Dixwell community, both its history and its local bird life.
[European Starling songs and calls]
Barbara Nasila: What I found in that discovery process is that there is already an existing conversation about birds and engaging birds into our urban living experience. I thought about my role in this project as more about amplifying existing voices and existing ideas about the environment, about nature, about people really living with and within nature.
She designed an entire urban oasis featuring a pond surrounded by trees, with space for local community groups to host events. But she left out one particular thing:
Barbara Nasila: I didn't feel like Audubon himself would have cared about the goals of this pavilion, and therefore I chose to not create a space for the book, instead create a space for the birds themselves.
[American Robin song]
Check out the full interview and see Barbara’s design at BirdNote.org. I’m Adé Ben-Salahuddin.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. European Starling ML185120241 recorded by Jay McGowan. American Robin ML168300 recorded by Wil Hershberger.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2023 BirdNote July 2023
Narrator: Adé Ben-Salahuddin
ID# nasilab-01-2023-07-21 nasilab-01
