Architecture is undergoing a fundamental shift away from human-centered design toward creating spaces that accommodate multiple species. This emerging movement challenges traditional architectural practices that have long prioritized human comfort while excluding other forms of life, instead proposing buildings and environments as shared ecosystems where humans, animals, and plants can coexist.
Modern architecture has historically been written through an anthropocentric lens, placing humans at the center while rendering other species invisible. However, this paradigm is rapidly changing as architects and researchers redefine the role of design in more-than-human worlds. Studios such as Office for Political Innovation, Studio Ossidiana, and Husos Architects are questioning human-centered narratives and reframing design as a collaborative practice between species.
In this evolving context, architecture is no longer merely a tool of control but serves as a medium for coexistence—a discipline that mediates between species, environments, and cultures. Traditional buildings have organized space for human comfort while systematically excluding most other forms of life, seeking to regulate temperature, isolate interiors from nature, and maintain control over the presence of plants, animals, and climate through artificial means.
Contemporary practice is fundamentally reconsidering this approach. Design no longer aims to protect humans from their surroundings but instead seeks to coexist within them. The traditional distinction between nature and architecture is dissolving as buildings begin to interact with the environments they once resisted. To speak of multispecies architecture is to address infrastructures of coexistence—spaces that actively foster, depend on, and care for other life forms.
This transformation demands a new ethics of design, one less rooted in efficiency and more grounded in reciprocity and care. As architect and theorist Donna Haraway notes, "We become-with each other or not at all," emphasizing the interconnected nature of all living systems and the need for collaborative approaches to spatial design.
Designing for coexistence requires accepting that architecture is never neutral. It distributes resources, defines access, and regulates relationships between humans, technologies, and other species. This understanding underlies the work of architects who reveal the hidden politics of built environments—those that determine how energy, bodies, and matter circulate through space.
Andrés Jaque's practice exemplifies this approach by exposing how architecture structures coexistence beyond its physical form. His work unveils the political dimension of domestic spaces, transforming kitchens, ventilation systems, and infrastructural networks into arenas where ecological and social forces meet. Rather than seeking equilibrium, his approach proposes architecture as continuous negotiation among living systems—a stage where friction, care, and interdependence coexist.
Through this lens, design becomes a tool to reconfigure the entanglements that bind humans to other species, making visible the flows of matter and power that sustain daily life. Projects like the Transspecies Kitchen demonstrate how everyday spaces can be reimagined to accommodate multiple forms of life while revealing the complex networks that support urban existence.
Other practitioners expand this political awareness into the material and sensory dimensions of architecture. Studio Ossidiana explores how matter itself can host life rather than resist it, treating architecture as a porous framework where water, soil, and organisms interact while emphasizing transformation over permanence.
In their work, materials such as shells, pigments, and porous composites are not inert surfaces but active participants that absorb, host, and respond to natural processes. By allowing materials to erode, calcify, or be colonized by other species, the studio challenges architecture's traditional pursuit of permanence and control. This approach transforms design into an infrastructure of care—architecture that facilitates exchange between species rather than dominating them.
Projects like NDSM Lusthof and Art Pavilion M demonstrate this philosophy in practice, proposing a more open-ended understanding of material agency where buildings are conceived as evolving environments. Through this sensorial understanding of form and material, Studio Ossidiana invites a rethinking of the built environment as a living membrane rather than a static boundary, suggesting that coexistence depends as much on how we build as on how we perceive.
The concept of coexistence also extends into the domestic realm, where boundaries between affection, comfort, and ecology blur. Husos Architects bring this perspective to the intimate scale of daily life, proposing homes that function as shared habitats for people, animals, and plants alike. Their approach integrates climatic design and emotional well-being, creating micro-ecologies that adapt to the needs of multiple species.
Domestic interiors become small ecosystems where temperature gradients, vegetation, and light establish forms of dialogue between inhabitants. Projects like "A Guy, his Bulldog, a Vegetable Garden, and the Home they Share" illustrate how living spaces can accommodate diverse needs while fostering interdependence. By situating environmental awareness within ordinary routines, their architecture suggests that ecological care begins not in monumental gestures but in the continuous attention given to shared spaces.
The Bioclimatic Prototype of a Host and Nectar Garden Building further demonstrates how architecture can actively support non-human life by creating spaces specifically designed for pollinators and other wildlife. These projects challenge conventional notions of domestic space while proposing new models for urban living that acknowledge the presence and needs of other species.
Across these contemporary practices, coexistence is understood not as a theme but as a method. Architecture becomes an active participant in ecological processes, serving as a political, material, and emotional link between human and nonhuman worlds. Designing for more-than-human contexts requires shifting focus from production to relation, from control to care.
This approach demands sensitivity to the networks that sustain life and awareness of the consequences embedded in every material decision. Architecture's role expands beyond form-making to become a way of thinking and living that recognizes interdependence as the foundation of design. Projects like Ojala by Office for Political Innovation demonstrate how public spaces can be reimagined to support diverse forms of life while creating new opportunities for interspecies encounter.
As architecture evolves beyond its human-centered foundations, it begins to act less as an artifact and more as a participant in the ecosystems it shapes. Coexistence becomes both an ethical horizon and a practical framework that transforms how materials are chosen, spaces are inhabited, and responsibilities are shared. The challenge is no longer to design for others but to design with them, acknowledging that human well-being is inseparable from the health of broader ecological systems.
By embracing this fundamental shift, architecture moves closer to what it has always mediated: the fragile, continuous dialogue between life, matter, and care. This emerging paradigm suggests that the future of architectural practice lies not in dominating natural systems but in learning to participate more thoughtfully within them, creating spaces that support the flourishing of all species while addressing the urgent ecological challenges of our time.
