Short abstract:

This paper examines the practices, subjectivities, and collectives that have coalesced around glass in the United States. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork with architects, I argue that the question of building has become entangled with the question of dwelling with animals.

Long abstract:

This paper examines the material practices, architectural subjectivities, and public collectives that have coalesced around glass in the United States. Conservation biologists have recently identified bird-window collisions as a global ecological crisis (Sutherland et al. 2023). Whereas glass buildings promised modernist ideals of transparency to architects throughout the 20th century (Eskilson 2018), many bird species (e.g., warblers, thrushes, and vireos) register this construction material otherwise, misperceiving their reflective surfaces as continuations of plein air. As a result, up to 1 billion birds fly into buildings every year (Loss et al. 2014). The “snarge” (Kroll 2018) they leave behind—at the Chicago Convention Center (Uteuova 2023), for instance—marks the point where species collide, to retweet Haraway (2008). It also marks an emergent point of contact among architects, ornithologists, lawmakers, activists, and homeowners concerned with the welfare of birds. In connection with the Bird-Safe Buildings Act in 2019, this network of environmental advocates has pushed for laws that mandates “bird-friendly glass” on new constructions in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. By drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork with architects who design this glass, I will analyze an emergent multispecies assemblage, a “more-than-human sociality” (Tsing 2013), held together by glass technologies. I will argue that the question of building in the “new climatic regime” (Laotur 2017) has become entangled with the question of dwelling with animals, in particular grasping nonhuman phenomenology (Despret 2021).