Exhibit at Chicago Architecture Center showcases designs for bird-safe buildings

Tourists flock to Chicago to see the city's soaring architecture, but for migrating birds, those magnificent buildings and their windows pose a deadly threat.

Now, to prevent that threat, a world-renowned architect is helping to build a bird-safe future.

In a city stacked with skyscrapers, it's easy to get a bird's-eye view. However, to understand a bird's perspective, it helps to lend an ear or at least a microphone.

J'orge Garcia, executive director with the Windy City Bird Lab, summits Chicago's skyscrapers to lay the groundwork for a bird-monitoring system.

"We are setting up these acoustic monitors that are listening to birds at night as they fly over, and they're making these calls to help navigate one another as they traverse this overly bright city," Garcia said.

Microphones are perched atop 45 buildings, helping to capture a picture of bird traffic in Chicago. But the buildings helping to monitor birds also threaten them.

"Over a billion birds die every year colliding with glass in the U.S. alone," said architect Jeanne Gang.

The loss concerns an avid birder like Gang. For decades, bird habitats have been on her mind as she builds around them.

Gang is the architect behind structures that define Chicago's skyline as well as frame it.

From the Aqua Tower to the St. Regis building to the Honeycomb Pavilion outside the Lincoln Park Zoo.

Bird-safe buildings are a priority for Gang and the focus of Flyway City—a new exhibit that Studio Gang co-curated with the Chicago Architecture Center.

"The Mississippi Flyway is this big swath in the middle, so we are the main city on the Mississippi Flyway," Gang said.

The exhibit promotes bird-safe designs, treating glass with patterned dots spaced two inches apart.

"It is visible to birds but almost invisible to the human eye," said Eleanor Esser Gorski, executive director of the Chicago Architecture Center. 

Gorski says she is proud that her own building leads by bird-safe example.

"Technology has increased in recent years in terms of retrofits and what can be done in new construction, and educating architects, designers on the materials that are out there and the different techniques that are available is a big part of this exhibit," she said.

Architects like Gang want to see bird-safety built into city code.

"There are cities that have adopted guidelines and regulations like New York, San Francisco, Toronto ...  all have in place codes that will, you know, make these lower levels of the building, which are the most dangerous, safe for birds," Gang said.

High above the exhibit, on the roof of the architecture center, a microphone now listens for migrating birds—keeping them all safe from collisions is a tall task. The kind fit for an architect.

"I want them to come out of here aware of what's here and aware of the solutions to protect birds and be an advocate for change," Gang said.