Joyce Hwang
Recorded: March 13, 2014
Joyce Hwang founded her Buffalo-based firm Ants of the Prairie in 2004 as an architecture and research practice “dedicated to developing creative approaches in confronting the pleasures and horrors of our contemporary ecologies.”
In 2014, The Architectural League named Ants of the Prairie an Emerging Voice. The annual Emerging Voices award spotlights individuals and firms based in the United States, Canada, or Mexico with distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urbanism. Each year, winners are invited to participate in the Emerging Voices lecture series.
In her presentation, Hwang addresses conflicted perceptions of urban wildlife and notions of the “urban pest,” and proposes ideas for how architecture can “move the consideration of animals beyond the scope of urban regulations and toward agendas of aesthetics, space, environment, performance, and even ethics.” Current and recent projects she discusses include Pest Wall; Bat Tower; Habitat Wall; Bat Cloud; Generative Zoning, a research project on combatting habitat fragmentation; and the Hive City design competition she organized at the University of Buffalo.
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