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     The Grackles, (the Common and Great tailed) are opportunistic birds which have embraced the suburban and city environments. They have boldly integrating themselves into the culture. The grackles take from their surroundings often building upon existing structures and mimicking sounds.  In Mexican folklore, the personality of the Grackle is captured in what is known as the Zante.  The legend of the Grackle, a bird created without a voice, visited the Great Sea Turtle of Knowledge and stole the seven Passions (Love, Hate, Fear, Courage, Joy, Sadness, and Anger) as its vocalizations for song. 

      The Grackles have migrated into the suburbs and the cities because of deforestation and outward expansion of human development. These gregarious birds adapted by traveling in large flocks for protection. This has negative effects with humans because the flocks will dominate grocery store parking lots and destroy farmer’s crops. The grackles have become iconic because of their personality, mimicking of sounds and sense of community as they have adapted to the humanized environment. This project rethinks the human enclosure to make a habitat suitable for the Grackles natural lifestyle along side humans. 

     The fabrication method for the house is inspired by the grackles’ way of making a nest.  A mated pair work together gathering and flying material to the nesting site. In my proposal, a team of robots work together to assemble prefabricated latticework of Chidori construction wooden modules. Once the modules are stacked, they can be filled with other materials or wood pieces for density and to give the grackles additional starting material.  The Grackles scavenges nature is represented in the sourcing of reclaimed the materials.

     The concept for the design is a humanized frame of architecture hidden amongst a thicket. The design was developed as a series of line weights. The thicker lines are the structure for the humans and the smaller is the thicket for the Grackles. For grackles, the spaces mimic the dense habitat of the bushes and pine trees where they typically make their nests. Over time the thicket will become its own ecological environment encouraging plant growth and attracting other animals.

At a collective scale 3 to 5 thickets will be a small community. The small communities function as a system of nodes placed on the Grackles migration path to provide a place of refuge. The project creates a growing collection of ecologies, materials and sounds which rethinks the suburban community.