Long before architects began adding bird bricks, bee hotels and wildlife corridors to contemporary buildings, animals were already helping determine the shape of architecture. Across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, buildings were designed to accommodate pigeons, silkworms, horses, cattle and wild birds as part of systems that connected shelter, agriculture, religion, labor and power. The history of these structures suggests that the idea of multispecies architecture is a rediscovery of an older condition, as human buildings have always been influenced by nonhuman bodies.
A pigeon tower in Safavid Iran could turn the free movement of birds into agricultural fertilizer; a farmhouse in Edo-period Japan could use the heat generated by a household fire to sustain silkworm production; an Ottoman mosque might incorporate small sanctuaries for birds into its facade. Elsewhere, animal architecture expressed feudal privilege or increasingly industrial systems of extraction. Seen together, these buildings complicate the contemporary image of architecture as a purely human domain, asking, when architecture makes room for animals, who ultimately benefits from that space?
Mardavij Pigeon Tower walls | image by Գարվիք, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
pigeon towers turn animal behavior into infrastructure
Across the agricultural landscape around Isfahan, Safavid pigeon towers, or kabootar khaneh, housed large colonies of pigeons while serving a practical role in agriculture. The mudbrick structures provided protected nesting spaces, while the birds continued to fly out and forage across the surrounding landscape. Inside, rows of nesting niches filled the thick cylindrical walls. The towers protected the birds from predators and made it possible to collect their droppings, which were used as fertilizer and, in some cases, as a source of saltpeter.
The architecture was closely tied to the behavior of the pigeons. The size and arrangement of the nesting spaces, along with openings for birds to enter and ventilation through the tower, were all part of keeping the colonies healthy and productive. At the same time, the birds connected the building to the surrounding farmland, where they fed before returning to roost. The pigeons were given a protected place to nest because their presence produced something useful: fertilizer and other agricultural resources.
Shirakawa-go | image by lumoplank, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
in japan, the farmhouse becomes a thermal system for silkworms
The gasshō-zukuri farmhouses of Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama are large timber houses built in the snowy mountains of central Japan, where domestic life and silkworm farming took place under the same roof. Their steep thatched roofs are perhaps their most recognizable feature, but the upper floors were also important for sericulture. Silkworms were raised in the attic spaces, while the hearth on the floor below provided heat that rose through the house.
Cooking, heating and silk production were therefore closely connected. The arrangement made the farmhouse a home and a place of production. The household relied on sericulture for income, while the layout of the building helped create the conditions needed to raise the silkworms.
Shirakawa-go | image by lumoplank, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
birdhouses turn the facade into shared urban space
The Ottoman kuş evleri, or birdhouses, offer a different approach to accommodating animals in the city. Built into the walls of mosques, fountains, libraries and other public buildings across Istanbul and other Ottoman cities, these small structures provided nesting spaces for birds. Some were designed as miniature versions of the buildings they were attached to, with tiny arches, roofs, ledges and other architectural details.
Builders deliberately incorporated nesting spaces into the architecture. Unlike dovecotes built for agriculture, these birdhouses were not primarily intended to produce meat or collect manure. Their presence was connected instead to religious and charitable traditions that encouraged care for animals. The small structures brought animal life into prominent public spaces, making birds a visible part of the city.
In Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat, the chabutro offers a different way of making space for animals in the city. These elevated bird-feeding structures are found within residential neighborhoods, providing food, water and shelter for wild birds. Their raised platforms help protect the birds from predators while keeping them close to the center of daily urban life.
Carved timber and stone, shaded platforms and projecting roofs give the structures a distinct presence within the neighborhood. The chabutro is notable for placing space for birds directly within the city, making feeding and caring for birds part of the shared public environment, a tradition also connected to Jain ideas of ahiṃsā, or non-violence, and compassion toward living beings.
Ayazma Mosque birdhouse | image by R Prazeres, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
ANIMAL ARCHITECTURE AND ARISTOCRATIC POWER
The French colombier and the Grandes Écuries at the Château de Chantilly show how animal buildings could also express wealth and social status. In early modern France, dovecotes were closely tied to seigneurial power and the droit de colombier, which gave certain landowners the right to keep pigeons. Their circular walls contained rows of nesting niches, while rotating ladders allowed keepers to reach the birds. Openings connected the pigeons to the surrounding fields, where they could forage before returning to the estate. Their meat and droppings then became part of the landowner’s economy.
The colombier at the Manoir d’Ango in Normandy makes this relationship particularly visible. Its elaborate construction served the practical needs of pigeon keeping, but its scale and ornament also reflected the status of its owner. The building was part of the estate’s architecture and its system of land ownership.
At Chantilly, this relationship takes on a much larger scale. Designed by Jean Aubert between 1719 and 1735 for Louis-Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, the Grandes Écuries gave horses an architectural setting more commonly associated with palaces and monumental buildings than agricultural structures. Its vaulted interiors and extensive stone construction reflected the importance of horses to aristocratic life.
Colombier du manoir d’Ango | image by Louistisserand, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
the model farm turns animals into measurable units
By the nineteenth century, animal housing was becoming more standardized. The British Model Farm movement focused on ventilation, sanitation and making farm work more efficient. John Claudius Loudon’s writings helped establish a more systematic approach to farm buildings, with cattle, pigs and other livestock housed in spaces designed around feeding, waste removal, ventilation and productivity. This was a shift from the more integrated arrangement of earlier buildings. In the gasshō-zukuri farmhouse, domestic life and silkworm production were closely connected. Model Farms instead treated animals as things that could be measured and managed. The buildings were designed to control the conditions around the animals. Ventilation regulated the air, drainage removed waste, and feeding systems reduced the amount of labor needed to care for livestock. Materials and construction methods could also be used to control temperature. The animal was increasingly treated as part of a system of inputs and outputs: feed, heat, space and labor were calculated against the amount of meat, milk or other products produced. This approach helped establish the spatial logic of modern industrial agriculture, in which animal production became increasingly separated from everyday urban life.
Grandes Écuries, Château de Chantilly, France | P.poschadel, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons
MULTISPECIES ARCHITECTURE AS A RETURN TO AN OLDER IDEA
Seen against this history, today’s interest in multispecies architecture begins to look less like a new idea and more like a return to a relationship that modern architecture has largely left behind. For centuries, animals were part of the spaces people lived and worked in, whether they were producing food and materials, contributing to household economies, protected for religious reasons, or serving as markers of wealth and status. Industrialization changed that relationship, moving animal production into increasingly controlled spaces and separating it from everyday urban life.
Looking at these buildings as animal habitats complicates the idea that multispecies architecture begins with contemporary ecological design. Some shelter birds without extracting anything from them, others depend on animals for food or agricultural production, while others turn animal housing into an expression of wealth and power. What they share is a recognition that architecture can create conditions for another species to live. The question contemporary architecture inherits is what those habitats are designed to do and what kind of relationship they establish with the animals that occupy them.
Chabutra in Ahmedabad | image by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.
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