When Birds and Glass Collide

While public awareness is key, architects do play an important role as visionaries showcasing new designs. “You can be creative architecturally but still be bird-safe,” says Kate Orff, a registered landscape architect at SCAPE, a New York-based firm, who directed the “Bird-Safe Building Guidelines” project. And while there are only a few architects speaking out about the problem, their collective voice will be a powerful one at this November’s Greenbuild. At the conference, which is attended by 25,000 architects, builders, and engineers, Orff, along with Fowle, Brown, and Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects in Chicago, will present a lecture on this aspect of building design. The group’s submission was one of 96 selected from more than a thousand applications—an auspicious sign that birds stand a chance of riding the green design wave toward a safer future.

This story originally ran in the November-December 2008 issue as "Pain in the Glass."