SOCIAL NATURE: Sustainable Architecture for Human-Animal Coexistence

SOCIAL NATURE, designed by Carlo Alberto Guerriero and Andrea Bordi, approaches these questions through sustainable architecture, landscape design, modular construction, and carefully controlled spaces for interaction. Recognized as an Editor's Choice entry of Strays 2020, the project proposes an alternative model for animal welfare architecture, one where shelter, public space, education, ecology, recreation, and community life become part of a connected system.

Rather than treating animals as occupants of an isolated institutional facility, SOCIAL NATURE creates a landscape in which small animal communities can establish natural social structures while maintaining opportunities for gradual and respectful contact with people.

Sustainable Architecture as a Framework for Coexistence

At the center of SOCIAL NATURE are three interconnected ideas: protected habitats for animals, spaces where compatible animal communities can form naturally, and a network of relationships between people and animals.

The project challenges the conventional architectural separation between human territory and animal territory. Instead of dividing the site with a rigid collection of fences, walls, and enclosed compounds, the proposal uses landscape architecture, changes in elevation, vegetation, pathways, bridges, shelters, and movable elements to establish different degrees of access.

Architecture becomes less about containment and more about mediation.

Humans can observe animals from different positions and elevations, while animals are provided with spaces where they can retreat, socialize, move, rest, and explore. The relationship is not designed as constant direct interaction. SOCIAL NATURE instead introduces layers of visibility, proximity, protection, and controlled encounter.

This makes sustainable architecture an active part of animal welfare rather than simply an environmental strategy.

Replacing Barriers With Landscape

One of the most distinctive ideas in the project is the attempt to reduce the visual and physical presence of conventional barriers.

Natural escarpments, planted areas, changes in terrain, water, pathways, and spatial separation help define boundaries. These elements create areas that can remain protected without making the entire facility feel like an enclosure.

The landscape plan develops as a composition of overlapping circular environments distributed throughout a larger green field. Each zone can support a different ecological or social function while remaining connected to the broader park.

Instead of one uniform environment, the project introduces different landscape identities that reference conditions such as mountain, prairie, woodland, and desert.

These environments provide animals with varied spatial experiences while allowing visitors to understand the relationship between habitat, behavior, vegetation, and climate.

The result resembles a landscape park as much as an animal shelter.

Protected Animal Communities

SOCIAL NATURE recognizes that interaction with people should not define every part of an animal's environment.

Several areas are reserved primarily for animals. These spaces allow individual animals or compatible social groups to remain separated from public activity while still maintaining connections with nearby habitats.

This distinction is important to the project's architectural logic.

The designers divide the site into environments with different levels of accessibility. Some spaces remain open as public landscape. Others are controlled interaction areas where humans and animals can meet under supervised conditions. Additional zones are dedicated specifically to sheltering animals and supporting the formation of stable groups.

This creates a gradient from public to protected rather than a simple division between accessible and inaccessible territory.

Architecture as Observation Rather Than Display

The project's circulation network plays a central role in creating this gradient.

A raised bridge crosses the landscape, allowing visitors to experience the park from above while reducing direct interference with animal habitats below. This elevated route becomes an observation device, circulation spine, and educational platform.

Other paths move through the park at ground level.

Together, bridges, walkways, natural trails, perimeter circulation, and temporary connections form a multi-level movement system. People can experience the site from different distances while animals retain opportunities to move independently.

This changes the conventional idea of observation.

Animals are not simply displayed to visitors. Humans and animals become participants within overlapping environments where observation can operate in both directions.

A Network of Natural Paths

The landscape is structured around several circulation systems.

A perimeter route connects pedestrian paths and the main access points. Natural pathways create shorter crossings and longer walks through the park. A central bridge provides a direct panoramic route across the site.

These systems allow visitors to choose different speeds and levels of engagement with the landscape.

Some visitors may move directly across the park. Others may follow slower routes through gardens, animal environments, and planted spaces.

The circulation design also responds to the wider urban context. A tram connection is proposed to link the project area with the city center, extending the concept of accessibility beyond the boundaries of the site.

SOCIAL NATURE therefore operates simultaneously as animal welfare infrastructure, public landscape, and urban destination.

Modular Animal Shelter Design

The smaller shelter structures reveal another important dimension of the project's sustainable architecture strategy.

Instead of relying entirely on permanent, fixed buildings, the designers propose modular wooden structures that can be assembled, removed, combined, and modified according to changing requirements.

Their forms are compact and adaptable, with movable walls, panels, frames, transparent components, and expandable sections.

Different modules can potentially respond to different animals, climates, seasons, or operational conditions. A shelter can remain relatively enclosed when protection is required, then open parts of its envelope to create greater visual or physical connection with the surrounding landscape.

This adaptability reduces the need to treat one architectural configuration as permanent.

The building becomes a kit of components capable of evolving with its occupants.

Designing With Circular Economy Principles

Circular design is embedded in the project's material and construction strategy.

The animal shelter modules are conceived largely in wood and designed to be modular and removable. Components can be grouped, reconfigured, replaced, or upgraded as requirements change.

Rather than demolishing entire structures when functions evolve, individual parts can potentially be adapted.

This approach extends beyond the shelters.

Greenhouses, interior elements, lightweight structures, and landscape components are conceived as systems that can respond to changing conditions. The emphasis on modular wood construction also reinforces the visual relationship between the architecture and its natural surroundings.

For SOCIAL NATURE, sustainability is therefore not limited to adding vegetation around buildings. It becomes a question of how architecture is manufactured, assembled, modified, reused, and eventually disassembled.

Temporary Connections for Animals

Some of the most experimental elements of the project are its movable animal pathways.

Long tubular structures made from canvas and mesh create temporary connections between different parts of the landscape. Their lightweight construction allows these routes to be relocated or modified.

These tunnels expand the territory available to animals without requiring permanent corridors across every part of the site.

They also introduce a dynamic quality into the architecture.

Instead of defining circulation only through permanent paths, the designers imagine animal movement as something that can change over time.

This flexible infrastructure supports the broader concept of SOCIAL NATURE: architecture should respond to animal behavior rather than expecting animals to adapt completely to architecture.

A Broader Animal Welfare Campus

The project extends significantly beyond shelter accommodation.

Architectural plans show a diverse program that includes spaces for animal care, veterinary functions, education, retail, hospitality, and administration.

Facilities include waiting areas, animal care spaces, medical examination rooms, laboratories, operating and hospitalization areas, staff facilities, offices, teaching rooms, and multipurpose spaces.

Public programs such as a plant shop, pet shop, bar, restaurant, and other commercial facilities introduce another layer of activity.

Rather than placing the shelter behind the public functions, SOCIAL NATURE integrates them into a larger pedestrian environment.

The intention is to make animal welfare visible within everyday social life.

Education Through Architecture

Education is another major component of the proposal.

A transparent conference and teaching environment creates a space where visitors can learn about animal welfare, ecological systems, responsible interaction, and the relationship between species.

The project also proposes screens, training panels, and educational installations along the bridge.

As visitors move across the site, circulation becomes an opportunity for learning.

Greenhouses, aviaries, transparent surfaces, and skylights strengthen this educational dimension by revealing different environmental conditions and vertical layers of activity.

Architecture therefore works not only as shelter, but also as an interface through which visitors can understand animals, landscapes, and ecological relationships.

Creating Freedom Within a Safe Environment

Animal shelter architecture has to negotiate a difficult contradiction.

Animals require freedom, stimulation, movement, and social contact, but they also need protection, controlled environments, veterinary care, and safe boundaries.

SOCIAL NATURE addresses this tension through layered spatial design.

Instead of constructing freedom as the absence of boundaries, the project creates different kinds of boundaries. Some are produced by landform. Others depend on vegetation, water, distance, elevation, modular structures, transparent surfaces, or supervised access.

This produces a more nuanced relationship between openness and control.

Animals can access substantial green environments while protected medical and shelter facilities remain available when required.

Humans similarly experience the park through multiple levels of access rather than unrestricted movement through every animal habitat.

Landscape as Social Infrastructure

One of the strongest qualities of SOCIAL NATURE is the way the project treats landscape as social infrastructure.

Meadows, flower gardens, trees, woodland environments, natural paths, water channels, shelters, observation areas, and public amenities are not independent decorative elements.

Together they organize relationships.

A woodland offers one kind of sensory environment. An open meadow produces another. Elevated observation creates distance, while controlled interaction areas allow proximity. Animal-only zones provide retreat.

This diversity allows the site to support multiple forms of occupation at the same time.

The architecture does not attempt to force every visitor or animal into the same experience.

Instead, it creates a framework in which different relationships can emerge.

Biophilic Design Beyond the Human Experience

Biophilic architecture is often discussed in relation to human wellbeing, particularly through natural light, vegetation, water, natural materials, and visual connections with landscape.

SOCIAL NATURE broadens this conversation.

Here, nature is not introduced simply to improve the human experience of a building. Landscape becomes shared territory between species.

Trees provide habitat and spatial definition. Water establishes visual and environmental continuity. Natural materials reduce the contrast between architecture and landscape. Open terrain creates spaces for movement and recreation.

The result is a form of sustainable architecture in which ecological thinking is directly connected to animal welfare.

From Animal Shelter to Shared Urban Landscape

SOCIAL NATURE ultimately proposes a different architectural identity for an animal shelter.

It is simultaneously a park, veterinary facility, educational campus, social destination, landscape system, observation network, and protected habitat.

The project does not remove separation completely. Instead, it carefully redesigns separation so that protection does not automatically mean isolation.

Its bridges allow people to cross without dominating the spaces below. Its modular shelters can transform according to changing requirements. Its animal pathways can be moved. Its landscape environments support different forms of behavior. Its protected zones give animals opportunities to retreat from human activity.

Together, these strategies establish a flexible ecosystem rather than a singular building.

Sustainable Architecture as a Relationship

The most important idea within SOCIAL NATURE may be that sustainability is not only about energy, materials, or environmental performance.

It can also describe relationships.

A sustainable relationship between people and animals depends on respect, distance, observation, care, education, protection, and opportunities for interaction that do not compromise animal wellbeing.

Through modular construction, natural materials, adaptable shelters, ecological landscapes, layered circulation, and carefully controlled encounters, SOCIAL NATURE translates these principles into architecture.

The project by Carlo Alberto Guerriero and Andrea Bordi, selected as an Editor's Choice entry of Strays 2020, demonstrates how sustainable architecture can move beyond designing buildings for animals.

It can design environments with their behavior, communities, freedom, safety, and relationship with humans in mind.

In SOCIAL NATURE, architecture becomes the connective tissue between shelter and landscape, protection and freedom, observation and interaction, and ultimately between human society and the animals with which it shares the city.