Architecture and Wildness. Editorial ERA21 #02/2023

Jakub Kopec

This issue of ERA21 was originally meant to focus on Zoological Gardens. As summarised in the introduction text, different impulses led to us shifting our field of interest away from these places of worldly entertainment of looking into limited animal enclosures. The abstract act of erasing boundaries between people and wild animals crossed the popular glass divides of zoo exhibits. Animals range free now, in their natural territories—though these are greatly diminished due to human activity. And ERA21 is looking at ways of expanding these territories again, physically as well as semantically. It strives for emancipation from the subordination to the anthropocentric approach to the environment and for the discovery of new ecologies of interspecies coexistence. As it turns out, rewilding doesn't have to end in regression, instead it can stimulate a fascinating transgression.

The theoretical texts presented begin with Sanford Kwinter’s Prolegomena to a New Urbanism, where he invites architects to work with design algorithms derived from the dynamic aspects of the environment. Next, an interview with Nina-Marie Lister sheds light on the interdisciplinary practice of landscape infrastructure planning for different species. Richard Weller’s text explains the World Park project connecting protected areas and biocorridors on a planetary scale. Hana Lesáková reviews recent architectural and artistic approaches to animal-friendly interventions in various city contexts. Ivana Rumanová and Peter Szalay look at the double wilding of Bratislava’s Lido. And at last, Borbála Soós’s text presents key ideas and points of departure in the work of Petr Bartoš, avant-garde artist and environmentalist, who bred pigeons in his Bratislava flat and was also interested in reintroducing the Hucul pony to their original habitats. Selected architectural projects weave through the above mentioned texts. They illustrate different forms of caring for diverse environments and careful cultivating of their hybrid ecologies