BirdScraper

Photo from Animal Architecture

Zhong Huang recently took third place in the Animal Architecture awards with plans for a BirdScraper in New York City. The massive structure designed to house birds should address the problems faced by our feathered friends. “Over 90,000 birds die every year by crashing into skyscrapers because lights inside the buildings attract birds flying right into their windows. NYC is the only major US city without a wildlife rehabilitation center – 4,000 calls from people seeking help for distressed wildlife each year and emergency care and rehabilitation to over thousands of birds; most of them were injured from crashing into the dense ‘concrete jungle.’ The skyscraper contains a unique ecological system that produces oxygen and sustains itself. Since the building is located in the middle of the lake, all bird feces will drop down into the lake, thus feces will turn into algae. All algae have photosynthetic machinery ultimately derived from the Cyanobacteria, and so produce oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis. This is the idea; more birds, they will drop more feces, and there are more algae. If there are more algae, they produce more oxygen.”—Animal Architecture

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 8:00 am. It is filed under Creative Culture, Nature, New York City, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.