Opinion - News Analysis   

Time to welcome bats in the belfry?

Jonathan Glancey

Modern buildings _ even `green' ones _ are built to keep wildlife out. It's time we opened our doors to animals.

WHATEVER YOUR religious beliefs or lack of them, the story of the birth of Christ in a stable in Bethlehem is as touching today as ever. We know the story from the evangelist Luke, told, with wonderful economy, in a single sentence: "And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn." This episode, depicted over the centuries in nativity scenes in churches, and later in markets and shop windows, is easy to warm to. There is, of course, the birth of a child. There is a family group, clean straw, swaddling clothes, shepherds — and, above all, animals.

Such a scene warmed generations of farm labourers to religion. Away from arcane debates over rituals and creeds held by brocaded bishops, converts were made and churches attended by an ever-increasing number of people for whom animals, fertility, and the cycle of life and death were the stuff of daily existence. Today, of course, most children in the developed world enter it in the fluorescent-lit wards of hospitals.

Anti-animal architecture

Today's architecture is determinedly anti-animal. For all the insistent talk about "sustainability" and "green" buildings, and the huge popularity of wildlife programmes on television, animals have been increasingly pushed away from the built environment.

So much so, that vast tracts of modern architectural development and urban landscaping are actually reducing the population of some of those animals we appear to be so very fond of at Christmas — if at no other time of the year. This distancing of animals, while imagining ourselves to be safe and clean inside our spick-and-span, chemically cleaned homes is, on one level, darkly comic. In many towns and cities, these same homes sit on heaving piles of maggots, rumpuses of rats, squealing mice, and all sorts of other creeping things. Even the most superficially perfect minimalist Manhattan apartment, designed by the most fastidious architect, will be scuttling with cockroaches before the residents move in and take their first power-shower.

Despite our best attempts to exterminate it, the animal world creeps, bounds and flaps around us. And, unless genuinely dangerous, we should learn to welcome it into our built environment. Our homes are not just for us, or our cats and dogs, but part of a much wider, wilder world.

Bryan Bland, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), would agree. "We tend to see far too many new buildings, especially homes, as products rather than a wider part of the landscapes they occupy," he says. "House builders and buyers alike have become used to the idea of hermetically-sealed, low-maintenance homes, that are just as much financial investments as they are places for people to put down real and lasting roots. Traditionally, houses and many other buildings offered any number of roosts for birds. Modern houses are sealed units, making much use of plastics and sealants that deny birds a footing, or a nest."

This year, the RSPB ran a campaign to counter this — the Homes Fit for Birds campaign. Next year it will make it a key issue, aiming to show people how they can live happily with birds, the insects they feed on and other related plants and wildlife. This includes advice on incorporating bird-bricks into the structure of new homes, building bird boxes, and planting gardens that will attract birds.

"We're saying to developers and house builders that they must learn to give back the homes to the animals they evict. If not in houses themselves, then in special wildlife areas within new developments. If you deck over a lawn, you get fewer insects for birds to feed on, and, of course, fewer birds. We also need to talk to architects to encourage them to stop paving over gardens and public spaces. Most of all, we have to get over the idea that architecture is not a product like a new fridge or deep-freeze, homes are not stocks and shares."

Not only is much contemporary house design and architecture anti-bird, bat and pretty much any other animal, it excludes them even in the abstract. One of my favourite architectural entrances anywhere in the world is the Elephant Gate leading into the vast Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen. Here, four 5 metre-tall granite elephants, with trunks that seem to sway, bear a mighty gateway on their broad backs. Dating from 1901, to designs by the Danish architect Vilhelm Dahlerup, the elephants, standing here in sun, rain, and winter snow, evoke strength, hard work, endurance, together with a certain exoticism.

If you look around your own town or city, you may well find animal sculpture all around you. Architecture and wildlife have, in fact, been intimately connected in most cultures around the world since the very first baked brick was placed on top of another some 10,000 years ago. Equally, animals were found within buildings, whether in stables, or, in much of the world, in the home itself. In remote Swiss valleys, wealthy, environmentally conscious, part-time farmers keep animals in the ground floors of those much romanticised cuckoo-clock houses.

Traditionally, the animals provided underfloor central heating, a happy by-product of the need to keep animals indoors during winter months.

Lessons from wildlife

Architects and engineers have long been fascinated by the structures animals themselves create. High-tensile structures, ambitious bridges or vast, net-like coverings over sports stadiums, owe more than a little to spiders' webs, which remain some of the lightest, yet strongest structures of all. Termite nests, which look like environmentally friendly skyscrapers, are exactly that: a form of ecologically sound high-rise building. Architects and their service engineers have yet to find a better way of maintaining constant temperatures in tall buildings, while using as little energy as possible. We can learn from wildlife at the same time as protecting and nurturing it.

"One big problem we face," says Mr. Bland, "is the continuing demonisation of many animals. Bats aren't dirty and they don't get caught up in your hair — but these fears and phobias continue. There's a very long way to go before people, wildlife and architecture get into some sort of balance." Why shouldn't architecture be at once solid and alive to nature, from spring to the depths of winter? —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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