Animals, Architecture, and Aesthetics

Professor Anna Blume, PhD

With bits and pieces of leaves and bark and fragments of beetle wings, Cylosa spiders of the Peruvian rainforest compose sculpted images of themselves in their orb webs that they spin with seven different kinds of silk emitted from spinnerets on their abdomens [fig. 1]. These larger-than-life spider sculptures deceive predators who would shutter to attach such a massive spider. The sculpted forms also allow the spiders to camouflage their bodies inside the massive sculpture as they wait for prey of their own; this act of concealment is known as crypsis and is common in the animal world. Beyond and alongside the practical uses of these spider-made spider sculptures, the animals themselves take time to find just the right-sized fragment, just the right color to create these works.

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics using AI to help hear what the human ear cannot [fig. 3]. These are just a few instances of the myriad ways that animals express themselves to one another and across species. The colors of bird feathers and the sounds of whales may be beautiful to us, but their aesthetic qualities are made for themselves within their ecosystems; we are the interlopers and voyeurs, but rarely the intended audience.

Dead Sea sparrows along the western Mediterranean camouflage their carefully-built nests in Tamarix trees, whose branches support the particular weight and geometry of their constructions [fig. 2]. Each spring, mockingbirds begin to compose a new song that they will later edit, sampling over twenty different components culled from the songs of other birds, urban car horns, and swishing sound of wind–which is currently being studied at the

As art historians, how can we begin to draw upon our honed skills of visual observation, description, and analysis to begin to see the way animals compose shape, color, and sound as integral elements of their daily lives? Thinking through these questions over many decades, I began to wonder what a class on animals and aesthetics would look like at FIT. So many of our students, studying anything from fabric styling to toy and fashion design, incorporate images and elements of animals into their work. How would they engage with such material and questions?

In the fall of 2022, I taught the first-ever section of HA 320: Animals, Architecture, and Aesthetics. This course of study took two years to write and included the exceptional input of Professor Sandra Skurvida and several other members of our department. In this course that I am also teaching this spring semester, each student chooses an animal to focus upon, to learn about their sensory experiences and built environments. One student researched, presented and wrote about coral, the single largest animal-made structure on the planet [fig. 4]. Another student is studying leafcutter ants, who are amongst the planet’s first agriculturalists, harvesting leaf fragments that they compost into fungus to feed their young. These ants collectively dig their nests into to the ground, then use their bodies to form the infrastructure of support which they then replace with bits of mud gathered miniscule mouthful by mouthful until they have an underground multilayered, multifunctional home not unlike an elaborate manmade subterranean city [fig. 5]

Student Artworks

In these two past semesters of teaching Animals, Architecture, and Aesthetics, I have only begun to learn the complexity and beauty of animal structures and performances, and I delight with wonderment at FIT students’ boundless curiosity and creative analysis.