Harriet Harriss
Right to Flight:
Preservation, Ritual, and Multispecies Care
Right to Flight is a creative, collaborative, public-engagement project that asks a deceptively simple question: who is the city for?
Each year, hundreds of thousands of migratory birds die in New York City due to collisions with buildings. This project responds to that reality not through abstraction or policy alone, but through making, ritual, and public encounter. Working together, students, artists, and community participants will transform a Brooklyn rooftop into a shared sanctuary for human and avian life—one that holds space for climate grief, ecological responsibility, and multispecies ethics.
The work unfolds over several months and culminates in a publicly interactive performance and permanent installation on the rooftop of Noosphere Arts (Noo Arts) in Greenpoint. Combining architectural fabrication, collective nest-making, grief-weaving practices, and a live rooftop event on 30th May 2026, the project opens Noosphere’s WE ARE NATURE: Transformation Stories six-month summer series.
This is not a conventional design project with a fixed “object” as its end point. Instead, it treats preservation as a process of care, asking how making, repair, and gathering can become forms of ecological stewardship.
Historic Building Birdboxes...
Architecture as RepairBird-safe nesting boxes and feeders are designed and fabricated in response to historic New York City buildings—particularly those associated with bird collisions.
Rather than reproducing buildings literally, architectural elements (facades, cornices, windows, towers, materials, proportions) are translated into scaled, inhabitable forms for birds. These objects transform architectures of harm into architectures of care.
The completed birdboxes are installed on the rooftop as functioning habitats and sculptural elements within the wider installation.
Bird Box Making & Grief-Weaving Workshops...
Over two days in March 2026, public workshops bring together bird box making and collective nest weaving. Community participants co-create a human-scale woven nest using brushwood, reclaimed textiles, and found materials.
Participants are invited to weave written messages of grief, gratitude, memory, and hope into the nest. The process foregrounds making as listening, and architecture as something built with others rather than for them.
The nest becomes both sculptural form and archive of collective feeling, later activated during the public performance.
Rooftop Public Opening & Live Performance
30th May 2026The project culminates in a public rooftop opening and live performance, bringing together birdboxes, woven nest, sound, movement, and audience participation.
The performance integrates live music based on endangered and extinct bird songs, collective movement, and participatory choreography. Audience members are invited to move as a “flock,” enacting interdependence, care, and shared vulnerability.
The event marks the formal opening of the rooftop installation, which remains accessible to the public throughout the summer season.
Working Ethos
This project asks for careful, ethical, and generous engagement. It deals with grief—ecological, cultural, and personal—and requires attentiveness to others, including non-human lives.
Above: Leslie Ruckman’s bird collision reproductions
Above: Leslie Ruckman’s bird collision reproductions
Right to Flight reframes architecture not as mastery over space, but as stewardship, listening, and shared responsibility. It asks students to imagine a city where survival, beauty, and care are not human-only privileges—and where design becomes a practice of living well together, even in the face of loss. This is historic preservation, conservation, public participation, performance, Architectural fabrication, Landscape Architecture, curation and conservation practiced gently, publicly, and with others.
Artists
Public Partners