More well known for designing skyscrapers, cultural centres, and urban masterplans for private clients, developers, mayors, or even authoritarian leaders across the world, ten leading international architects have spent time for an altogether different and more feathered client. Architects for the Birds is a project conceived by Norman Foster and Marie Donnely to raise money for the Tessa Jowell Foundation, a charity supporting innovation in NHS Brain Cancer Services to expand knowledge and research into brain cancer, the illness that took the life of the Labour politician and Culture Secretary of State in 2018.

So far, the charity has supported work at 14 UK hospitals, covering a population of over 40million people and including 6 paediatric neuro-oncology centres. Over 1500 health care professionals have received free online training and networking, and now Lord Foster has invited nine architectural colleagues to help build on the charity’s work in an exhibition at Christies in London coinciding with the start of Frieze Week.



Foster’s own design comprises two pieces of bird architecture, a series of four spun aluminium cones suspended on tubes for feeding and a standing column holding another cone as a bird bath. The typical Foster-esque neatness, practicality, smoothness, and engineered detail (00101) is there, while the matte green finish is designed to sink it into any surrounding nature.

Some of the other offerings from Foster’s network are altogether more out there, though perhaps the future occupants will be less aesthetically judgemental than some architecture critics so long as the functions of feeding, bathing, and sheltering is a success. Grafton architects took inspiration from a Saint-Jean Perse prose-poem, Birds:


Their response is a Suprematist-like sculpture of interconnected circular and geometric elements, as much a game of balance and exploration for birds as it is a service for feathered friends.




Sou Fujimoto, fresh from designing the 61,000 square metre Grand Ring at the Osaka Expo 2025, here designs a project also of wood though somewhat smaller. Perhaps inspired by the urban sculptures by fellow Japanese creative Isamu Noguchi (00020), Fujimoto has created a tessellated tree of connected hollow forms. Each can hold water, seeds, or feed, with the overtly sculptural form intended to dialogue with nature and user over time and provide whatever is needed in any environment.

Also using wood, Frida Escobedo takes a decidedly minimal approach with a framework scaled to suit common birds of London including magpies, pigeons, tits, and blackbirds. In contrast, Lina Gotmeh goes full bird-Baroque with a swirling blown-glass design, drawing inspiration from floral nature and just a delicate, fragile, and precarious.



It is interesting to see how architects often recognised for a singular aesthetic can adapt it to work with new design parameters, and for an altogether smaller client than normal. If the works were anonymised, it would be interesting to see how easy it would be to recognise which design is from which studio. Would someone guess that the birdbath and feeder formed of a ready-made mass-produced bowl and container from a domestic kitchen was by Jacques Herzog? Perhaps not, though they may guess the suspended feeder of undulating ceramic planes was by Farshid Moussavi.




At the end of the week exhibition, each birdhouse will be auctioned to raise money to help the charitable work of the Tessa Jowell Foundation. Brain cancer is the biggest cancer killer of children & adults under 40 years old, with the funds & awareness raised helping important research & work, for both those affected by it & people working on its treatment.