By Kat Barandy

Birds have been building with human-made materials for a long time. Wire, plastic, fabric and other discarded scraps routinely find their way into nests, where they are put to work again and are given new life. In recent years, the examples have become stranger. Magpies and crows have constructed nests from metal spikes installed specifically to keep birds away from buildings. Along the front line in Ukraine, birds have woven fiber-optic cables discarded by military drones into their nests.

LEAVING THE ARCHITECTURE UNFINISHED

MIT-LUMA Lab’s Bird+House furthers this idea even still. Developed by Hiroshi Ishii, Lucy Li and Hye Jun Youn with input from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the 2026 project creates 3D-printed nesting structures for barn swallows whose traditional nesting sites are disappearing alongside barns and other familiar structures.

The team begins by 3D-scanning existing swallow nests and studying their dimensions before printing open scaffolds from locally sourced biomaterials. The most important detail is that these structures stop halfway. It’s been found that barn swallows often reject artificial nests that are fully completed, so Bird+House gives them a framework and leaves the final construction to the bird. The swallow chooses how the nest is completed by adapting the scaffold and adding its own material.

It’s a small gesture, but it shifts a familiar relationship between human and feathered builders. A birdhouse usually arrives as a finished, human-made object awaiting an occupant. Here, occupation continues the act of construction. The architect determines enough to make coexistence possible, then another species takes over.