This is Bird Note.

During her first year at the Yale School of Architecture,

Kenyan graduate student Barbara Nassila was tasked to design

a hypothetical outdoor pavilion in a local neighborhood called Dixwell

with an original copy of the enslaver John James Audubon's book

The Birds of America as its centerpiece.

It's a book so large that its pages are only turned once a year.

I picked the Dixwell side because I personally

am more focused on designing for black and brown communities.

It's an opportunity to kind of work with people that in some

they will look like him and feel like me.

Barbara got to work learning about the Dixwell community,

both its history and its local bird life.

And what I found in that discovery process is that there is

already an existing conversation about birds and engaging birds

into kind of our urban living experience.

I thought about my role in this project as more about amplifying

existing voices and existing ideas about the environment,

about nature, about people really living with and within nature.

She designed an entire urban oasis featuring a pond surrounded by trees

with space for local community groups to host events.

But she left out one particular thing.

...