How humans could live together with animals – culture

Anyone passing by the “Schau Fenster” gallery in Berlin’s Lobeckstraße in the coming days and weeks will see the exact opposite of things like insect spray, ant bait and mouse traps, like in the windows of a department store, namely: building elements for an “architecture of the cohabitation”. This is said to be “man-made architecture that does not kill, injure, deprive of liberty, or otherwise harm non-human animals.” Rather, it should “actively invite them to use it” and thus ultimately offer “contact spaces for non-human animals and humans to meet”.

You first have to accept that, which is a challenge in a world that has at least produced the profession of exterminator, because many human animals often react with little enthusiasm to contact with mice, rats or cockroaches in their rooms, for example. The word “cohabitation” in this spelling is also known primarily from French politics, where it describes the confrontation of a president with a parliamentary majority from the opposite political camp, i.e. actually a state of lived aversion. The “Manifesto for an Architecture of Cohabitation”, which an ecologist, a landscape planner and an architect wrote together, does not allow a differentiation according to sympathy for certain living beings; Rather, it calls for the distinction between wild, farm and domestic animals, vermin and vermin to be eliminated, as well as the paradigms of safety and hygiene needs that have shaped construction up to now.

The manifesto is as radical as such texts tend to be. In the latest issue of the magazine Arch+, entirely dedicated to the topic of “Cohabitation”, there is even a “General Declaration of the Rights of Organisms”, which also demands the political representation of all species down to the bacteria. Doesn’t sound like something to be taken seriously? Naive? paternalistic? May be. But it could also be that “The Communist Manifesto” wasn’t taken as seriously as it was.

The fact that the theory-loving Berlin magazine deals with something like this in detail and is already presenting the second exhibition on the subject, that it is supported by the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin Senator for Culture, is not as surprising as it is not only for people with phobias of city pigeons first of all sounds. The clairvoyant Norberto Bobbio, one cannot come back to him often enough these days, had already predicted in the early 1990s that, despite all the post-modern crippling of the political camps, a fundamental egalitarianism would remain constitutive for the thinking of the left – and that this egalitarianism would inevitably at some point encounter the relationship between humans and other species.

Whether you want to use, eat, keep or reject animals is not a private matter

This is exactly what has been observed for some time. The discourse on dealing with animals is becoming increasingly moral, fundamentalist in the literal sense. Whether one uses animals, eats them, keeps them in one’s home or rather keeps them strictly out of it is no longer a private matter, but a political one. And even if this discourse is still conducted largely academically, it also occasionally moves into “meeting rooms” with the spheres of practical politics. The fact that in Switzerland, for example, a far-reaching legislative initiative that wanted to give animals human rights in practice, failed this winter, had made things such as the security of supply with medicines a publicly debated topic beforehand, because their production conflicts with the ethics of radical animal protection.

In the Berlin “Schau Fenster” room, dares now Arch+ some kind of reality contact. Some time ago, a first exhibition in the “Silent Green” cultural quarter had opened up the subject of more artistically designed works on display, so now follows a kind of sample show of what is already on the market in this direction. Where the ethical is simply presented with considerable apodicticism, hopefully at least the aesthetic can be discussed. And lo and behold: friendly consideration of animal needs and needs does not have to make buildings less attractive for humans, quite the opposite: As, just one example of many, the “Aqua Tower” by Studio Gang in Chicago proves, it is not just for birds It’s an advantage if the glass facades are designed in such a varied way that they don’t bang against the reflective panes, because billions of them die every year as a result, but – quite anthropocentrically speaking – also for the view of the building from the street.

The fact that cities often look built-up is not only due to bad taste

It is well known that birds like to hack open and inhabit thermal insulation panels made of plastic in front of our house walls; and that one could also use more ecological materials than the ugly and flammable fossil hazardous waste of the future is comforting to see. Even more interesting, of course, would be what the bureaucrats in the building administrations and real estate loan approval departments of the banks have to say about these new forms of inviting permeability. Because so far the whole system has been geared towards the opposite. There are reasons that especially German villages and towns often look so clinical and cold, so sealed and built up, that don’t just due to the builders’ bad taste.

Open detailed view

In this context, it almost seems like a déjà vu when a piece of the roof of a house is exhibited here, which supports a swamp landscape. (Swamps bind a particularly large amount of CO₂). After the end of the GDR in Berlin-Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg there were still plenty of roofs that resembled swampy landscapes and from which small groves often grew, and all by themselves. For decades since then, it has only been a question of privatizing and “expanding” the wildly growing commons of the largely freely accessible roof areas in order to sell these thermal buffer zones of rooms that are stuffy in summer and icy in winter at bizarre prices with the aura of exclusivity of penthouses. But maybe, who knows, having such a private swamp overhead will make living in attics even more valuable in the end.

In other words, it will be interesting to see how political, ecological, real estate and building law interests must find their way into a “cohabitation” with its very own shared flat dynamic. History already delivered breathtaking dialectic volts when the egalitarian efforts of planners, architects and social engineers were still concentrated entirely on people. In the end, Fourier’s utopia of the “phalanstères”, conceived as workers’ palaces of free love, became just a “familistère”, in other words practically the opposite. The egalitarian housing complexes of the socialist mass housing construction found themselves at some point with the stigma of being considered typical spaces of right-wing violence.

Open detailed view

It will be interesting to see how the current attempts to use woody plants as a renewable raw material for building or at least as a symbolic material for a new ecological sensitivity will soon be judged. After all, plants have long been discussed as pain-sensitive, communicative creatures. The logic of these debates should at some point also question their use for the interests of people in the construction industry as a kind of enslavement.

And then? It quickly becomes quite inorganic if you think further along this line – but then again surprisingly stylish. Because I have no idea how birds and bats see things, but the many dwellings for them that hang on the wall in this Berlin exhibition often remind the human eye of the rough minimalism of private homes or museum buildings made of classic, energy-intensive, but always very beautiful Midcentury-styleexposed concrete.

Architectures of Cohabitation, an exhibition in the Schau Fenster, space for artLobeckstrasse 30-35 Berlin, until June 5, 2022.