As the planet grows more crowded, and wilder spaces continue to disappear, architecture must adapt to form an urban habitat that accommodates both humans and non-humans. The Living Orders of Venice builds interest, wonder, and care for non-human city dwellers by hosting a crowdsourced ecological field study of the Biennale grounds using iNaturalist, a citizen-science app. It also playfully engages the classical orders of architecture by creating prototypes of three “Living Orders”: novel forms of shelter suited not to an idealised human body, but to Venice’s animal inhabitants.
