Multispecies Design with Joyce Hwang

02/04/25 • 18 min

As a young girl growing up in suburban Los Angeles, Joyce Hwang loved seeing how urban animals would create little moments of disorder in the highly manicured landscape. Now the intersection between animals and the built environment is at the very heart of her work as a professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo and as director of the ecologically focused practice Ants of the Prairie. Hwang’s projects, from bat towers to bee elevators to multispecies installations, have been on display throughout the world and have won multiple awards. In this episode, she talks to host David Hill about incorporating animals into our constructed spaces—what it entails, why it’s critical (for us as well as them), and what everyday people can do to make their homes and yards more accommodating to our non-human friends.
Credits:

Host: David Hill
Guest: Joyce Hwang
Writer/Producer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group

Coming May 6: Earthworms enjoy a pretty good rep. In truth, they’re an invasive species in the Northeast, not always a friend to our gardens, and a real menace to our forests. But they can be beneficial too. In this episode, ecologist Nick Henshue sheds light on the poorly understood creature, explaining how we can exploit its benefits while minimizing its potential for harm.

Previous Episode

Changing the Black East Side with Henry Louis Taylor Jr.

As a young clinical audiologist, Henry Louis Taylor Jr. found that the socioeconomic realities of many of his Black patients affected his ability to help them. To truly serve his community, he realized, he would need to understand the root causes of their circumstances. So he quit his job and went back to school to study urban history. Now, as the founding director of UB’s Center for Urban Studies at the School of Architecture and Planning, and associate director of the Community Health Equity Research Institute at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Taylor is on a mission to reverse the historic inequities that have created such a wide gap between Black lives and white lives. In this episode, the self-proclaimed activist scholar talks to host Ellen Goldbaum about his latest and most ambitious effort: The East Side Neighborhood Transformation Project.
Credits:
Host: Ellen Golbaum
Guest: Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
Writer/Producer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group

Next Episode

Urban Classical Music with Jeff Scott

Since his band teacher went alphabetically by last name, Jeff Scott’s choices were limited when it came his turn to pick an instrument. The sixth grader pointed to the French horn—and the rest is history. Today, Scott is one of the nation’s premier French horn players and a Grammy-winning composer. Among other accomplishments, he’s played on Broadway, toured with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Ray Charles, and co-founded a world-renowned woodwind quintet. In this laughter-filled episode, Scott tells host Cory Nealon about his unlikely path to musical success, his experiences on the road with A-list artists, what it felt like to win a Grammy, and how his multicultural upbringing in Queens, N.Y., shaped the urban classical music he shares with the world today.

Credits:
Host: Cory Nealon
Guest: Jeff Scott
Writer/Producer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group

Driven to Discover - Multispecies Design with Joyce Hwang

Transcript

David Hill: As a young architect fresh out of Cornell, Joyce Hwang once had a client come to her with a rather shocking request. Could she incorporate into her building design window ledges that would keep birds out by electrocuting them?
Joyce Hwang: It just felt wrong, and there were a lot of things in the profession that made me think about the environment in different ways. So I decided to go back to graduate school to understand how we might be able to