The League’s FF – Distance Edition, an online version of the long-running First Friday series, will continue on Thursday evenings. This season’s events feature design practices that are redefining the contemporary public landscape by responding to social and environmental concerns and exploring the intersections of architecture, technology, and ecology.

FF – Distance Edition brings participants on site, offering virtual access to practices’ workspaces and current projects. Following each presentation, join in an open conversation with the designers.

In the words of its director, Joyce Hwang, Ants of the Prairie is an architecture and research practice dedicated to “confronting the pleasures and horrors of our contemporary ecologies.” For over a decade, the practice has “explored the gaps in the logics of sustainability, with attention to designing for biodiversity enhancement and environmental justice.” In its recent prototypes and experimental designs, Ants of the Prairie has focused on incorporating habitats for non-human species into the built environment.

Completed projects include:

• Bat Tower, a built prototype for a bat habitat designed to increase public awareness of bats as a critical component of our ecosystem.
• Habitat Wall, a prototype wall structure for bat and bird inhabitation  that acts as both a façade and a living membrane. 
• Life Support, a vertical “habitecture” structure, developed with the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Parks and Conservation Service

Current and upcoming projects include:

• To Middle Species, With Love, an installation in Columbus, Indiana, providing bird perches and functioning similarly to the bat houses used by the endangered Indiana Bat.
• Co-Occupy, an in-progress development of a live/work habitat for humans and non-humans.

This program will be moderated by Lola Sheppard and Mason White, the founding partners of Lateral Office in Toronto, Canada. Sheppard is a professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Ontario, Canada, and White is a professor at the  University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.