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Ghosts in the Glass: An Architectural Hauntology of Bird-Window Collisions in the United States

RSVP forthcoming. 

This in-person lecture is part of the Spring 2026 Sciame Lecture Series, "The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes."

Richard Fadok (he/him/his) is an assistant professor of anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A multispecies ethnographer and anthropologist of design, his research asks how the built environment shapes ordinary relations of violence, care, and justice between humans and other animals. He is currently working on a multi-sited ethnography about the environmental politics of bird-window collisions and bird-safe design in the United States. Alongside his anthropological research, he is the founder and director of Smash the Crash, a university and community initiative to end bird-window collisions in Rochester, New York.

"Ghosts in the Glass: An Architectural Hauntology of Bird-Window Collisions in the United States": Ornithologists currently estimate that upwards of one billion birds die every year in the United States from window collisions. A human-driven source of avian mortality second only to habitat loss, this “conservation crisis” has literally mortified the built environment, laminating the urban landscape with carcasses and other signs of death that are, to those who witness them, horrific and haunting. In this talk, I linger with the haunted materialities of glass to illuminate how architecture entangles multispecies modes of living and dying in the North American city. Once celebrated by Le Corbusier as “the fundamental material of modern architecture,” glass today has come to bear the moral load of anthropogenic injury and violence. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork with scientists, architects, bureaucrats, and residents, I ethnographically trace how specters of animal life pervade expert and everyday notions of beauty, dwelling, and belonging. A hauntology of bird-window collisions provides an analytical lens through which to conceptualize architecture as both a world-making and an un-making affair.

Suggested Reading: Dobraszczyk, Paul, and Joyce Hwang. "Animal Architecture." In conversation with Richard Fadok. Places Journal, July 2025.

"The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes" takes its title from the expression “the elephant in the room,” which originates in the Russian author Ivan Krylov’s 1814 fable “The Inquisitive Man.” In the story, a visitor to a natural history museum becomes so enthralled with countless “birds and beasts” that he overlooks the largest of them all: a colossal elephant. As the expression gained currency, any reference to real animals gave way to metaphorical ones. The spring 2026 Sciame lecture series takes the idiom literally by addressing the common failure to notice all animals in the built environment. In the lecture series, scholars, designers, thinkers, and activists cast light on imagining, designing, and sharing buildings, cities, and landscapes with other species.

Making space for animals in the built environment often requires diverting attention away from our human perspective and desires, thus troubling our own anthropocentrism and claims about human exceptionalism. More often than not, the built environment creates antagonistic, if not deadly, conditions for animals. Ballooning construction campaigns, invasive resource extraction for building materials, and hermetically sealed structures have all decimated animal habitats and killed countless animals. Given the planetary threats of diminishing biodiversity, the climate crisis, and health emergencies, recentering animal lives and human-animal relationships in the built environment is critical to the survival of all animal life.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.

Sciame Auditorium (Room 107) 141 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031

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