The writer and cultural thinker John Berger once wrote: “The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.” For Berger, the ancient relationship between humans and animals had been broken.
But what if we tried to fix that?
In the mid-1970s, the architecture and media collective Ant Farm envisioned a floating research base called Dolphin Embassy. On this base, researchers would live side by side with dolphins, learning to communicate with them and even copiloting the vessel together. Conceived as a reaction against consumerism and capitalism, Dolphin Embassy was a hopeful vision of how humanity might repair its broken bond with nature.
My guest today is Paul Dobraszczyk, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He’s the author of books such as Botanical Architecture: Plants, Buildings and Us (Reaktion, 2024) and Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us (Reaktion, 2023). His forthcoming book, The Matter of Architecture, will be published by Reaktion next year.