A Professor Creates a Condo for Bats (There’s a Lesson in It, Too)

Joyce Hwang’s Bat Tower was designed for a sculpture park near Buffalo, N.Y. (U. at Buffalo photos)

An assistant professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo has created a striking bat house for a local sculpture park, and she says she hopes the high-profile project will help make more people aware of the infection that has decimated the bat population in parts of the country.

Joyce Hwang, the designer, says the 12-foot-high tower is constructed of more than 400 pieces of finished plywood arranged to provide long, tight spaces in which the tiny residents would be comfortable. She took her inspiration, in part, from the caves that bats frequently inhabit. The tower is held together by steel cables and screws.

Located beside a pond in the Griffis Sculpture Park, about 30 miles south of Buffalo, the tower was paid for with a $10,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Students helped Ms. Hwang assemble the tower and then helped plant chives, oregano, and other herbs intended to attract insects on which the bats can feed.

One of the project’s goals, Ms. Hwang says, is to teach people about white-nose syndrome, which was first detected in 2006 and which has killed countless bats since. The disease strikes bats while they hibernate.

“White-nose syndrome is a major ecological crisis,” she says. “Bats are animals that people practically consider to be pests, so there is a lack of desire to see them in the environment around us. But bats are a critical part of the ecosystem, and now they are facing this threat.”

“Since I was a graduate student, I have taken an interest in the constructive relationships between humans and animals and how we can shape our environment in a beneficial way,” Ms. Hwang says. “Bat Tower draws attention to bats by challenging the notion of a bat house being something nondescript that fades into the background.”