Niche
Related terms: adaptation, context, ecology, evolution, sustainability
A ‘niche’ is the subset of a habitat as it relates to a specific organism. Rooted in Darwin’s theory of evolution, the concept develops the notion of fitness to a specific place. Organisms may share a habitat but have very different niches, depending on the resources that they require. In contemporary common usage, and beyond its meaning as an alcove, the term has evolved to have new meaning in business parlance, to mean a specialized segment of the market. But the notion of the niche is also having a contemporary resurgence in the design disciplines, where reconsiderations of the relationships between an object or a building and its environment have become increasingly urgent. The resurgence and the term’s clarification is important because the concept of the niche removes the separation between the terms animal and environment. That is, it does not allow each one to be considered independently. One foot in the organism, one foot in the location, the niche is neither a thing nor a place: it is a relationship. In a niche-thinking practice, designers can no longer develop designs that sit mutely in their site. They must develop relationships, dialogs, a mesh of interactions with a subset of the environment. This entry charts the origins and evolution of the term niche in the design disciplines today, amid crises of environment, culture, and society.
The term ‘niche’ first appeared in a 1917 paper titled “The Niche Relationships of the California Thrasher” (Grinnell 1917). For author Joseph Grinnell, a niche was defined by both the habitat in which a species lives and its accompanying behavioural adaptations. It is not only part of the environment, he claims, but also a subset of the organism. The California thrasher’s form (its short wings, its strong legs), its camouflage, and its feeding behavior were all inseparable from its chaparral habitat.
This builds on Darwin’s well-known observations on finches in the Galápagos, each having evolved in isolation via ‘adaptive radiation’ to fit local conditions. Ground finches have large beaks for seeds; tree finches, more delicate ones for insects or nectar. Morphologies in beaks, feet, song, and so on co-evolved with niche requirements. “Natural selection,” Darwin wrote, “works silently and insensibly…at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its conditions of life” (Darwin 1859, 65).
Grinnell’s work was expanded by Charles Sutherland Elton, who redefined the niche of an animal as “its place in the biotic environment, its relations to food and enemies” (Elton 2001, 64). In his book, Animal Ecology, Elton aligned species’ niches with jobs in a human community, emphasizing co-evolution and the mutual shaping of both species and environments.
Since then, the term has been redefined and expanded more than once. Zoologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, for example, refined what he called the “n-dimensional hypervolume,” a multi-dimensional space of environmental conditions and resources necessary for a species’ survival. While multiple species might occupy the same habitat, Hutchinson wrote, no two can occupy the same niche indefinitely (Hutchinson 1967).
More recently, the term has evolved via works such as Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003) and Environmental Evolution: Effects of the Origin and Evolution of Life on Planet Earth (Margulis, Matthews, and Haselton 2000). Both highlight how organisms actively push back on their environments. Beavers redirect rivers, corals build reefs, fungi cycle nutrients, and so on.
Today, the evolution of the niche concept is perhaps most alive in theories such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which model complex, dynamic assemblages. In ANT terms, for example, a building may be considered less an object, more a network-in-the-process-of-becoming, and composed of actors both human and non-human: weather, materials, legislation, memory, insects, utilities, and so on.
Inevitably, the notion of the niche spilled into other fields. Psychologist James Gibson translated the concept into perceptual psychology: “Animal and environment make an inseparable pair. Each term implies the other,” he wrote (Gibson 1986, 8). Gibson also recognised that multiple animals could inhabit the same place, each perceiving a different “surrounding.” A related idea appears in Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt – the world as it is experienced by a particular organism (Von Uexküll 1934). According to the theory, animals imbue their environment with meaning as evaluated by their needs. He uses the common tick as an example: the tick responds only to light (to climb), smell (to drop), and skin (to burrow). Blind and deaf, Von Uexküll writes, the tick’s perceived world consists of nothing else. The Umwelt is an abstraction, unique to the organism, shaped by what he calls ‘action-possibilities.’ The book’s illustrations (by Georg Kriszat) attempted the impossible: to depict these perceived worlds. One image showed the perceived environment of a bee compared to that of the human: where one comprised of a flower-filled meadow with fore, middle and background foliage, the bee’s world is made up of stars and circles, and a dashed flight path. Inevitably, these diagrams cannot come close to representing the perceived Umwelt of a non-human, but the attempt illuminates the concept. For the bee, the world consists of nectar, pollen, the way home, aspects of the scene that are present for the human but much less prioritized in our understanding of the world.
One can imagine the organism drawing in – whether literally or metaphorically, representing with its own needs and priorities, the parts of the environment that are relevant to its survival: its niche. In this sense, the organism becomes a mesh of systems and materials, inseparable from its environment.
The diagram below represents an early attempt to diagram the niche of the giraffe-savanna. Here the figure of the giraffe dissolves and the representation draws in elements of the habitat that are vital to the giraffes survival, both internal and external.
Figure 2 [click to enlarge]. Giraffe Diagram. CODA, 2012. From Niche Tactics: Generative relationships between Architecture and Site, Routledge, 2015. The diagram rejects the figure of the giraffe in favour of a representation of the niche, which includes the organism and those parts of the environment essential to the animal’s survival
My question, back in 2012, when I first made this diagram was: what if architecture is conceived in the same way? Not as isolated object, but enmeshed in a feedback loop between itself and its place, a notion first introduced to me by Greg Keeffe and Geoff McKennan, professors in the Bioclimatic Unit at the Manchester School of Architecture.
The link was clear. Vernacular forms were a simple model of architecture adapted to its niches: Think Mexican adobe construction as a response to heat gain and the need for thermal mass; the jigged-entrances of the Scottish stone hut as a response to strong cold winds; the steeply pitched roofs of the Malaysian stilt-dwelling as a response to heavy rains and uncertain ground conditions.
But, since Modernism’s erasure of site-specific design, architecture had become more and more disconnected from vernacular knowledge.
In the 1960s, “Contextualism” arose in opposition to Modernism’s relentless detachment from place. Coined by Stuart Cohen and Steven Hurtt in 1965 at Cornell, the freshly-minted term described a design methodology on which form was derived from its surroundings. R.E. Somol would later describe Contextualism succinctly: as a rejection of the “internationalist utopia of nowhere” in favor of the “contextualist nostalgia for somewhere” (Somol 1992, 94).
At its best, Contextualism would harmonize buildings with their surroundings. At its worst, however, it was in danger of becoming a bland, conservative imitation. As Cohen later lamented, at its worst it risked being a “subservient repetition of the building next door,” (Cohen 1974, 66). Colin Rowe, too, later admitted that Contextualism could be a “radical middle of the road” (Rowe 1996, 2), while Mark Wigley condemned it perhaps most strongly as “an excuse for mediocrity… for a dumb servility to the familiar” (Wigley and Johnson 1988, 17).
Critical Regionalism emerged as a more nuanced alternative. Coined by Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in the early 1980s, it rejected mimicry and pastiche while upholding “the individual and local architectonic features against more universal and abstract ones” (Tzonis and Lefaivre 1981, 15). Kenneth Frampton positioned the concept as a middle ground between a “high-tech” and a “compensatory” approach (Frampton 1983, 17) – a way to resist homogenization while avoiding nostalgia.
Twenty years later, Critical Regionalism emerged as a second wave of Contextualism that addressed these concerns and offered a more nuanced alternative. Coined by Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in the early 1980s, it aimed to uphold “the individual and local architectonic features against more universal and abstract ones” (Tzonis and Lefaivre 1981, 15). Kenneth Frampton argued for the concept as a middle ground, a compromise between a “high-tech” and a “compensatory” method (Frampton 1983, 17). Still, neither version fully broke free from a style that seemed muted, compromised, and mediocre.
In the twenty first century, the conversation around site and context forward design continued with books like Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories and Strategies (Kahn and Burns 2004) and its 2021 follow-up (Kahn and Burns 2021) arguing for architecture’s renewed engagement with site. Beyond simply contextual deference, architects were pressed to return to site as a generator due to increasing focus on sustainability. With increasing focus on sustainability, architects were urged to treat the site as more than a surface or setting.
Yet standard site analyses were often overly generic, something architects did lip-service to without the results significantly shaping of the design that followed. In ecological terms, while the generic site analysis might have captured overall habitat conditions, it rarely understood them as niches that co-evolve in a reciprocal feedback loop with the organism or building design.
In Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site (O’Donnell 2015), I argued for a return to an understanding of the architectural terms ‘site’ and ‘context’ as tied to the concept of the niche. Through what I called niche tactics, I hoped to reconsider the design process as the evolution of form in its projected, extracted environment, i.e. in the same way that the tick, the bee, or the giraffe projected its needs onto the environment and responded primarily to those parts of the environment projected back. A niche-tactical design methodology would treat the building as an organism evolving in dialogue with its surroundings, seeking or shunning solar energy, light, water, space, temperature equilibrium, and social and cultural engagement, and so on. The resulting forms may evolve to be ugly, awkward, lop-sided, or twisted, but would communicate that reciprocal, adaptive relationship. They would point to those parts of their niche that they connected with, in the same way as the elongated neck of the giraffe pointed to the juicy leaves of the acacia tree. Form would emerge from the real, site-specific pressures of coexistence. Moreover, not only would it emerge, but its entanglements would be legible.
Many architectural practices have by now embraced this attitude, foregrounding sustainability and life-cycle analysis into design. Others prefer advocating building less, building to disappear, or building to change. For example, Lateral Office’s Arctic Adaptations proposed a mobile, seasonal infrastructure that responded both to permafrost instability and Inuit nomadism. Shigeru Ban’s Paper Log House, exemplified low-tech, mobile design that was first deployable, then recyclable. Beyond the purely environmental response, firms like Anna Heringer’s have begun to engage in more social and cultural building practices. The METI Handmade School in Bangladesh, for example, was built from mud and bamboo, using traditional techniques and community labor, teaching brickmaking as a repeatable skill to its construction workers, while utilizing vernacular methods and materials.
In my own work, Party Wall at MoMA PS1 (CODA 2013) was an experiment in architectural reuse and transformation. Constructed from leftover skateboard manufacturing byproducts, the structure used waste as a cladding material while also responding climatically: it cast shade, caught breezes, and channeled activity. Here, the work was not complete until the human entered: as if the body was simply another material. The human’s interaction with the removable façade to populate the site with benches depending on the event of the day, transformed the piece physically, giving it a living quality. Further, the perception of the piece demanded that the entire niche (sun, ground, shadow, wall) be considered in order for the semi-hidden meaning transcribed into the work to be perceived.
Other projects such as Evitim (OMG! 2017), (Figure 3), Tripe (CODA 2018), and Goosebumps (CODA 2016) engaged in various ways with the use or pre-design of waste in order to provoke thinking around issues of waste and reuse (O’Donnell and Pranger 2019).
More recently, the work began to engage in time-based processes that understood architecture as a process of entropy, degeneration, growth, and action. Primitive Hut (OMG! 2016) was a small structure made of woven willow that explored temporal and material ephemerality, allowing the building to decay, adapt, and be reborn seasonally (Figure 4). Zimmer (OMG! 2015) was a physically dynamic structure that used Chebyshev locomotion to move itself around a site seasonally (O’Donnell and Ibarra 2022).These works attempted to advance niche architecture beyond theory toward a practice, exploring and testing how buildings might operate as adaptive agents in ongoing dialogue with their environments throughout their lifetimes.
These experiments attempted to prod questions around the ways architecture might express its entanglements, its back and forth dialogue with its habitat, its niche-ness.
As for the future of niche tactics in architecture, contemporary theoretical biology continues to offer opportunities for evolution of the term beyond my written and built work. The work of Brian Goodwin and P.T. Saunders in Theoretical Biology: Epigenetic and Evolutionary Order from Complex Systems (Goodwin and Saunders, 1992) explores how form and function emerge from self-organizing systems, arguing that the development of form is shaped by both genetic and environmental forces. Similarly, in Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (Varela 1979), the notion of autopoiesis suggests a way of thinking about architecture as a dynamic and evolving system, always in one or many states of flux. Or, in another example, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s Evolution in Four Dimensions (Jablonka and Lamb 2014) expands on our notions of nature and nurture toward the possibility of including learned behaviors and material-cultural systems. A reading list, perhaps, for my own future work, or a gauntlet thrown to another willing design thinker that probes new questions on the role of inheritance and lineage in design and the continued evolution of the building after construction.
References
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