Architecture has spent centuries refining its relationship with the human body. Proportions, sightlines, circulation, and comfort have all been calibrated to an assumed average user. In a recent guest essay for Designboom, Paris-based architect Ariel André of the studio GOLEM asks what happens when that assumption is set aside. What if buildings were designed first for bees, for blind visitors, for animals, or for bodies that do not fit the standard template?
Ariel André – Starting from a Different Standpoint
André’s argument begins with a simple childhood memory. After nightmares, he would close his eyes and imagine himself as a bee asleep among flower pistils, a young bird in a feather-lined nest, or a snake moving across moss without predators. The exercise was not fantasy for its own sake. It was an attempt to inhabit a different sensory world.
That same shift of perspective, he suggests, can guide architecture. Instead of designing primarily for visual impact and human convenience, architects might begin from the standpoint of those usually left outside the frame: non-human life, people with different sensory capacities, and communities whose needs have been historically marginalized.
The goal is not to replace human needs but to expand the field of who and what architecture serves. Changing the starting point changes the forms that follow.
Broken Hearts Bazaar as Working Example
André points to a recent project as an illustration. For the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, GOLEM designed and built Broken Hearts Bazaar, a cluster of colorful conical structures commissioned by Gayane Umerova and curated by Diana Campbell. The installation prioritized scent over sight. Visitors moved through spaces where smell became the primary way of navigating and experiencing the architecture.
The project treated architecture as something that could be felt before it was seen. In doing so, it opened the work to people who do not rely on vision in the same way, and to non-human visitors whose relationship to space is olfactory rather than optical. Bees rested on clover. Cats investigated paprika-coloured walls. The structures became shared environments rather than purely human stages.
Beyond the Visual Default
Much of contemporary architecture still privileges the eye. Renderings, photographs and critical writing tend to emphasize form, material finish and spatial sequence as they appear to a standing, sighted observer. André’s essay challenges that default. Smell, touch, temperature, sound and the needs of other species all become legitimate starting points for design.
This approach aligns with a broader movement sometimes called transspecies or more-than-human architecture. Buildings begin to include nesting spaces in façades, landscapes designed as shared habitats, and materials chosen for their ecological relationships rather than only their visual performance. André’s contribution is to insist that these considerations should not remain special cases. They can become ordinary methods of design.
Pleasure as Design Principle
A recurring idea in the essay is pleasure. Architecture’s transformative potential, André writes, can be used to produce alternative realities guided by pleasure. The pleasure in question is not limited to human comfort. It includes the full expression of different lives in their singularities. Designing for a bee’s preference for certain flowers or a blind visitor’s reliance on texture and scent expands the repertoire of what a building can offer.
This is not a purely theoretical stance. GOLEM’s work across restaurants, galleries, public programs and installations consistently tests how material, color, softness and sensory layering can create spaces people want to stay in. The Diriyah Biennale Foundation’s public programs building, for example, was treated more like a large living room than a conventional institutional space, with looping sofas, soft surfaces and reconfigurable furniture.
Implications for Practice
Taking non-human and non-standard perspectives seriously changes everyday decisions. Façade details might include nesting cavities. Material choices might consider how surfaces feel to the touch or how they age in ways that support other life. Circulation might prioritize scent trails or acoustic landmarks alongside visual ones. Public space might be designed for the animals that already inhabit cities as much as for the people who walk through them.
André does not claim these shifts will be easy or complete. He presents them as a necessary expansion of architecture’s responsibility. The discipline has long claimed to shape how we live. Expanding the “we” changes the work.
A Quiet but Persistent Challenge
The essay arrives at a moment when architecture is already under pressure to address climate, equity and ecological limits. Adding non-human perspectives does not replace those concerns. It deepens them. A building that supports insect life, that can be navigated by smell, or that offers pleasure to bodies outside the standard template is also a building that thinks differently about resource use, accessibility and shared urban space.
Ariel André’s contribution is less a manifesto than a practical invitation. Start from a different standpoint. See what forms appear. The bee asleep in the flower, the bird in the hollow of a tree, the visitor who experiences space through scent rather than sight, all become legitimate clients. Architecture that listens to them may look, feel, and smell different from the architecture we already know. That difference is the point.
