What if I’m just one animal among many ?

What if artificialising the land were in our Nature? What if I didn’t have to give others a voice? What if I didn’t have to think on behalf of others? Would I go on building bridges for deer?

The goal of this text is to propose a thought experiment, a shift of viewpoint, a decentring. The intention is to use this decentring to generate new questions, different approaches. For that reason, this text is built around “What if”: What if I looked at things more in this way?

The question I have been asked today is: how can I consider the nonhuman in my understanding of space? In my view, the question that precedes it concerns what it means to consider something. What is behind it? What is its nature, its motivation?

What I see as consideration is the relationship to others, including nonhuman others. And I think that it is by exploring this relationship that we can see the emergence of other ways of thinking about architectural construction. And it is those other ways that interest me.

The hypothesis I am going to advance throughout this text, throughout this “What if”, is as follows: at present, when we consider others (whether a nonhuman animal or a plant), it is always in relation to the human. This way of considering the other, always by reference to a human metric, traps us in a way of thinking that separates us from the rest of the living world and hinders creativity. This consideration, with the human as its default frame of reference, notably takes the form of a distance between self and other. The closer the capacities of the other are to mine, the more consideration I give. For example, we will care more about species that appear to share our emotions than those that don’t. Legally, a chimpanzee and an insect will not enjoy the same protection.

Others are thus placed in a hierarchy in relation to us, notably by the attribution of utility (material or symbolic) or non-utility. The level of consideration thus varies, for example, between endangered species (symbolic utility) such as the red deer, livestock species (material utility) such as the fallow deer, and species regarded as pests (without utility), such as the roe deer. Yet all three are species of deer. This hierarchy is, of course, a consequence, an extension, of the first point. Finally, the last effect of this consideration relative to self, relative to the human, its final expression, is “I put myself in the place of”. For example, I imagine what it’s like to be a deer living near a big city on the edge of the forest and I build places on the basis of what I think the other thinks. That’s how we started building bridges so that deer can cross the city, the road, etc.

To avoid these three pitfalls, I propose three stages. In the course of these stages, we are going to identify the main questions that arise from thinking within the “Us And others/Against others/ Outside others” framework and try to move towards an “Us Among others” framework.

First pitfall: the distance from me to the other

The first trap, the distance from the other, concerns the issue of the artificial and the natural. Contrasting the natural and the artificial implies that whatever humans produce is no longer natural. We act as if human beings and their actions, their impacts, were no longer part of Nature. By separating humans from their biology, this question inhibits thought. In architectural terms, we confine our thinking to “what impact do I have the right to cause to my environment by making it artificial?” Yet if I take the example of the termite (Syntermes dirus, to avoid naming it), it has an extraordinary impact on its environment. With all its 1 cm length, it generates mounds of waste up to 2.5 m high, in other words 250 times its own size, which on human scale would be equivalent to mounds rising 400 m in height. But that is not all. The galleries it forms completely restructure and modify the Nature of the soil. What if, as with the termite, we stopped speaking of humans artificialising the soil, and instead spoke of humans adapting their environment to their needs? This reveals that our needs relate to our environment and to everything around us. The question shifts from how to tackle the challenge of not turning land into something artificial, to what we can do to keep the land viable and enable us to live a long life.

This first sidestep is still not enough. The question remains much too anthropocentric in its approach to human needs and human survival. We are still in the “Us And Others”.

Second pitfall: Above or below?

We need to consider others. But what is the nature of that consideration? I’m going to take the example of the consideration for “minorities” in our society. We often hear, from people who already have a voice (and therefore a certain power) the typical “I’m going to give a voice to”. What are these people doing when they say this? They maintain power by being the ones who decide, the ones that consider who deserves to have a voice, to express themselves. But as a woman, I believe that I quite simply have a voice. The voice I have exists as a fact. It doesn’t depend on whether or not some supposedly powerful person chooses to recognise it or not. A voice is not something I’m given, it is something I take. In that case, the question for the person of power is no longer “who should I give a voice to” but instead “how should I let people speak?”, “how should I hold my tongue?” Hence, seeing that a person has a voice, a voice that exists whatever I think, demands a shift from the question of “how should I give a voice and who should I give it to” to “how can I hear it?” and therefore “how can I shut up and listen?”. So this enacts another decentring. When it comes to the question of architecture and other species, this could be described as the transition from “I think that there should be no place for pigeons and cats in the city” or else “I think that deer have the right to cross the bridge” to the recognition that these other species quite simply exist. They exist in this place so the question is “how can I let them occupy and modify this space?”, in other words “how can I hold my tongue and listen to them?” Ultimately, we shift from moral, ethical or even legal consideration, to a consideration of fact, which opens up the question:

What does listening to others mean in architecture?

Third pitfall: on behalf of

The risk in this question, the risk to be avoided, is the third pitfall of conventional thinking – “I think on behalf of”. Not thinking for others, not always falling into the same trap of thinking that the other doesn’t really exist without me, outside me. Thinking on the other’s behalf actually means “So-and-so would have said that…”. So what can I do to leave space for the other to speak? Especially as in this case the other is multiple, so I can’t imagine those others in their totality, and undoubtedly some of those others have absolutely no conception of me. And even if I were able to imagine those species, I can’t think on their behalf: how do you make a city beautiful for a pigeon? Might not defecating on the city be a way for the pigeon to create beauty? Or else to resist, to protest against this way of arranging space?

This is what I propose: accept the What if What if, rather than wondering what the other thinks, we wondered about their intentions? Intentions – regardless of their forms – are not the actual individual, but an expression of the individual at a given moment. This temporality, this gap, this distance, gives the individual the space to exist as a reality. In architecture, when I occupy space, I have an impact on those who lived, live and will live there. One might be tempted (especially with the approach that I am trying to deconstruct here) to minimise or even eliminate that impact. But that is not possible. One would end up doing nothing. What if, in the knowledge that I am going to have an impact, I wondered how I could allow the other the choice to react to that impact? What can I do to allow the other the responsibility for what I do to her or him in the architecture I create? In other words, how can I design space in such a way that the other can make a choice and can tell me what it is? How can I create spaces that enable me to hear, to see the other’s choice? Going back to the example of the bridge, what if rather than building that bridge, I created a space that other species could visit when they wanted to visit, a space that other species could alter when they wanted to alter it?

Not being an architect myself, I can’t imagine – without falling into one of the three traps described here – what impact(s) this text might have on architectural thinking. However, I can suggest another step towards that what if by inviting you into the following thinking space:

■ What if I had to devise a system that left this multitude –a multitude that I cannot really imagine – the choice of whether or not to take part in this project?

■ What if the keystone element of a project were “I allow the other – whether animal or plant – the choice of visiting, living in and modifying this space”?

In the end, would you build a bridge for deer in this space? And above all, what spaces (of thought) are you going to invent?