Black-and-white collage: Ethan stands in front of drawn marsh grass wearing a large woven wire shell on their back, which trails behind them into a long tapered net resting on the ground.

ARCH 172 · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · 2025

Beaver's Burden

Gizmo architecture that works alongside beavers to rewild the Kankakee Marsh: something you wear, a boat, and a field of shipping-container-sized interventions.

Role Sole designer Tools Rhino, Illustrator, Photoshop

The story

The studio spent the semester on one brief: rewild the Kankakee Marsh, and design gizmos that help do it. This gizmo had to be wearable.

Beavers are a keystone species, especially for wetland habitat. They were once central to Midwestern river ecosystems, holding water on the land, making habitat and supporting biodiversity, so I followed them all semester. The wearable lets a person embody the beaver's experience.

The Beaver's Burden is a wearable apparatus that gathers dam-building materials. It combines two lemniscates into two volumes, one for the person and one for what they collect. The Catama-raft is a rowing-powered vessel whose netted hold and waterwheel mechanism clear invasive plants from riverbanks, making room for native species.

At the scale of infrastructure, a field of shipping-container-sized interventions manages water flow, supports field research and creates habitat. Together they bridge human engineering and animal architecture.

What I did

  • Designed and modeled each device and the landscape-scale system
  • Built wire models, drew, collaged and animated the mechanism as a GIF
  • Figure drawings of classmates, used to study how a body carries the burden

Process

  • The wearable was photographed in five positions: standing, crouching, crawling and two swimming poses (boards dated February 17, 2025)
  • Figure drawing (January 2025) → shipping crate gizmos: volumes named Solar, Blow, Fold and Orbit (April 2025) → Beaver's Burden and Catama-raft → landscape axonometric (May 2025)
  • Why lemniscates: I love when complexity comes out of simplicity. The lemniscate is a simple form, but it could carry this design: it gave the two volumes the brief needed, one for the human body and one for the collected materials.
  • Material: the studio required modeling in rebar tie wire, and a lemniscate was a form I could bend easily from it.
  • Built at full scale and worn: I made the wearable full size and filmed myself acting out its use (standing, crouching, crawling, swimming). The film became a stop-motion loop with my figure traced in outline.

Outcome

  • Final title-blocked boards, a 3 × 6 ft landscape axonometric, a video and a mechanism GIF

Reflection

I love when complexity comes out of simplicity. One simple curve, doubled, could hold a body and a burden, and I could bend it by hand from tie wire. Wearing it was the point: to feel, for a moment, what a beaver's work asks of a body.

Drawings

The wearer crawls on hands and knees through drawn marsh grass, the wire shell covering their back like a carapace and the net trailing behind.
Crawling
Wearable, stop-motion loop. A one-minute stop-motion loop in black and white: Ethan, traced as a white outline over photographs, wears the full-scale wire wearable and moves from standing to crouching, crawling and swimming in front of drawn marsh grass.
A small boat model on a pale grey backdrop: a folded white paper hull, a black wire frame rising over the stern, fine netting strung between the wires, and a length of tan twine trailing to a hook at the bow. A tiny white figure sits in the middle.
Catama-raft, model
A tall axonometric landscape in pale blue and grey. Boardwalks of dark posts loop across it in circles and figure-eights, joining a field at the top, a band of bare winter trees, open water with small greenhouse-like structures, and a marsh at the bottom dotted with shipping-container-sized boxes in purple, brown and green.
Landscape axonometric