Avian architecture

When Tunjai Dogan, a first-year architecture student at Truckee Meadows Community College, randomly selected both an architect and a “client” for his final project, he might not have expected them to share as much in common as they did. His chosen architect, Minoru Yamasaki, designer of the World Trade Center buildings, prefers vertical, linear designs. The client, the Cassin’s Finch, prefers to inhabit high elevations, finding them to be ideal vantage points to safeguard itself and scout for predators. Together, the architect and the feathered friend appear to be a perfect match.

Student architects at TMCC were hard at work last week on their final class projects. The challenge, assigned by Professor Ellis Antuñez, was simple enough. Students drew from a hat the name of a prominent architect—"one who had a major influence on architecture in the past or a well-known, current architect whose work is influential.”

After sufficient research on their chosen architects, the students had to design residences with strict dimensional limitations appropriate to their clients’ needs. That the clients just happened to be native Nevadan birds, also selected from a hat, didn’t worry Dogan, who said his goal was not to “adapt the bird to the house, but adapt the feature to the birdhouse.”

In order to create birdhouses that successfully merged the fowl and the artists, ample knowledge of the birds’ idiosyncrasies and habits was necessary. Pam Brown, a student who drew the killdeer, became quite interested in her bird. After studying the killdeer’s likes and dislikes, migratory patterns and breeding habits, Brown ultimately decided on a structure suited to the bird’s nesting practices.

But how do you reconcile the tastes of a bird that doesn’t like humans and that nests wherever it happens to scratch its foot in the ground—laying its eggs in a dirt hole—with a modernist Brazilian architect (Oscar Niemeyer) who spent much of his time creating sprawling government buildings out of concrete in the ‘50s and ‘60s?

This is where the architect’s real-life, problem-solving skills come into play—the impetus behind the project. Brown settled on an open environment with a nesting area tucked away in a corner, more of a platform unto which the bird could rest and find shelter. Incorporating fewer but more specific aspects of Niemeyer’s designs, Brown chose to adapt a simple but effective set of windows that could open and close as needed, “shielding [her] little birdie from the wind.”

While practicality and function have their place in John Sardari’s drafts, his approach stemmed from a more conceptual school of thought. Sardari’s plan took its cue from architect Eric Owen Moss’s theater design in St. Petersburg, Russia. Centered around a birdbath, the design will allow the social Brewer’s Sparrows to sun themselves surrounded by undulating, fractured glass, broken planes and harsh geometrical shapes.

But all this asymmetry was not without restrictions. The form of his bird in flight inspired Sardari’s triangular design, and he incorporated the Fibonacci series (the infinite sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, … of which each succeeding numeral is the sum of the two immediately preceding) and the golden section (another related mathematical phenomenon) into his birdhouse—a theoretical but exact discipline that makes for even more of a challenge. Sardari, like most of the students in the class, was not familiar with the selected architect at first, but after delving into the research, found his subject to be quite fascinating. The biological research, he said, was another story altogether.

Whether it’s student David Allen Rose’s idea for sitta carolinensis in the style of Kisho Kurokawa or Diana Graves’ Mountain Chickadee retreat à la Louis Sullivan, these students all take their work seriously, but they also share the similar attitude that, as Sardari puts it, "the bird can’t complain to us to change our design."