Built for Everyone: Architecture, Scale, and Space in a Multi-Species World
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
The grocery store on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic takes up half a city block, and the first thing you notice when you walk in is the ceiling.
It's not that the ceiling is high — though it is, high enough that the Polar Ursinian reaching for a top-shelf item near the back doesn't have to bend. It's that the ceiling doesn't feel like an accommodation. It feels like a design decision, which is exactly what it is. The shelving runs in parallel tracks from floor to ceiling along the main aisles, with pull-down handles at the Giant-grade level and lower auxiliary shelves that a Vulpen can reach without a step stool. The service counter near the deli is tiered: a tall surface, a medium surface, a lower surface, all occupied at the same time by whoever happens to be placing an order. Near the entrance, the shopping carts come in four sizes, stacked in their separate corrals.
A Leonite and a Vulpen can do their grocery shopping in this store on the same afternoon without either of them navigating a space that wasn't built for them. This is not an accident. Someone drew it this way.
Public Space: Designed for Everyone at Once
The foundational principle of multi-species public architecture is simple to state and demanding to execute: the building has to work for every size class that will use it, and it has to work from the start.
This is not the same as universal design in a single-species world, where the challenge is accommodating a range of mobility levels and abilities within a relatively consistent size band. In a multi-species world, the size band itself is the variable. A two-foot Vulpen and a twelve-foot Polar Ursinian are not two ends of a spectrum — they are almost entirely different physical propositions. A door that's comfortable for the Polar Ursinian is a cathedral entrance for the Vulpen. A door built to Vulpen proportions is a crawl space for the Leonite. The solution is not to split the difference. It is to design for both, simultaneously, from the blueprint.
What this looks like in practice varies by building type, but the logic is consistent. Restrooms in any public building of consequence are designed with multiple stall configurations and sink heights for each size class. Not a handful of "accessible" stalls retrofitted alongside standard ones — an integrated layout where the Giant-grade stalls and the Small-grade stalls and everything between are part of the original plan, with appropriate plumbing and spacing for each. Corridors in government buildings, hospitals, and schools are wide enough to allow two-way Giant-grade traffic without bottlenecking the Large-grade flow. Seating in theaters, chapels, and public halls comes in size-graduated sections so that every attendee has a seat that fits them, with sightlines calibrated to account for the fact that a seated Polar Ursinian and a seated Vulpen are not at the same eye level.
The grocery store on Flatbush is doing a version of this. So is every public library, every transit station, every school gymnasium, every church nave designed with a full congregation in mind. The multi-scale approach is not a special feature. It is the standard. The alternative — designing for one size class and treating everyone else as a problem to be accommodated after the fact — isn't just inconvenient. It's a statement, and in a world where the Imago Dei framework holds that every person bears the divine image fully and completely, that statement is not one a public institution can afford to make.
Private Space: Built for the Person Who Lives There
The home operates on different logic.
A public building has to serve whoever walks through the door on any given Tuesday. A home serves the people who live there — and the people who live there are a specific family, a specific size, a specific set of daily physical needs that don't change when the front door closes. A Grizzly Ursinian family's kitchen needs to be a Grizzly Ursinian kitchen. The counters need to be at Grizzly Ursinian height. The refrigerator is a Grizzly Ursinian refrigerator. The bathtub is built for someone whose frame, when horizontal, takes up considerably more space than the standard Large-grade fixture. Building that kitchen to multi-scale standards would mean building a kitchen that works adequately for everyone and perfectly for no one — which is exactly the wrong outcome in a space designed for daily use by a specific household.
So private homes are built for the size class of the people who will inhabit them, and this means that the housing stock of any given city is genuinely varied. A Lupenite family and a Grizzly Ursinian family looking for a three-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood are not shopping in the same inventory. The Lupenite is looking at Large-grade units. The Grizzly Ursinian is looking at Giant-grade units. The buildings that house each exist side by side on the same blocks, but they are not interchangeable, and nobody expects them to be.
What this means for visiting is a particular kind of physics that every resident of a multi-species city understands and nobody discusses much, because it's simply how things are. A Leonite invited to dinner at a Vulpen friend's apartment is welcome — genuinely welcome — and will spend the evening navigating a space where the furniture is not built for them, the ceiling is closer than usual, and the dinner table requires a certain careful rearrangement of limbs. The host didn't exclude them. The host lives in a Vulpen apartment because the host is a Vulpen. The Leonite will fold themselves in, make do with good humor, and probably not fit in the bathroom. This is understood on all sides and carries no social weight. It's just physics.
The reverse is equally true. A Vulpen visiting a Polar Ursinian family's home for the weekend is a guest in a space where the counters are above their head and the sofa requires a running start to climb onto. The family will do what they can — a step stool appears, a smaller chair is located somewhere — and the Vulpen will manage, because Vulpens are accustomed to navigating a world that wasn't built entirely for them. It's not comfortable. It's not meant to be comfortable. It's just a visit.
The Neighborhood
In the older neighborhoods of most cities, the housing stock was built in eras when the dominant size class of a given development shaped everything that went into it. A block of brownstones in a neighborhood that was developed primarily for Large-grade residents has Large-grade stairs, Large-grade doorframes, Large-grade ceiling heights in every unit. A row of townhouses built for Giant-grade families has proportions that feel slightly overwhelming to a Lupenite who tours one and slightly inadequate to a Polar Ursinian looking for headroom.
The result, over time, is soft clustering by size. Not by species — a Giant-grade block in Brooklyn might house Leonite families, Grizzly Ursinian families, and Tiscythian households on the same street, because what they share is not a species but a size class, and a Giant-grade house works for all of them. Within the Giant tier, softer clustering still: the Polar-grade houses, built for the largest grade within the Giant class, tend to accumulate Polar Ursinian residents simply because they're the ones who need that much ceiling.
This clustering is not legal. Nobody zoned it. Nobody enforced it. It's the accumulated result of practical decision-making by thousands of individual households over many decades: you buy the house that fits your family, and the house that fits your family is in a neighborhood where similar houses exist, which means your neighbors are likely to be a similar size. A Lupenite family can buy a Giant-grade house. The house will be too large for them in various ways, the ceilings will feel cavernous, and they may find it charming or they may find it inefficient, but nothing prevents the transaction. Most Lupenite families don't make that choice. Most families, of any species, choose the house that fits.
Newer developments work differently. A residential block built in the last several decades often includes a deliberate mix of unit sizes — Giant-grade units on the lower floors with their higher ceiling requirements, Large-grade units stacked above, a section of Small-grade units tucked into a wing where the proportions allow. The street-level retail is designed to multi-scale standards. The lobby is designed to multi-scale standards. The result is a building that serves a genuinely mixed population, and the neighborhoods that contain several of these buildings can feel more integrated at the block level than the older brownstone blocks nearby.
Where the City Comes Together
The thing about size-clustered neighborhoods is that they don't stay that way when people leave the house.
The Giant-grade block and the Small-grade block are separated by four streets in either direction, but both blocks share the same public library. Both use the same transit system. Both shop at the same kind of grocery store, send children to the same kind of school, worship at the same kind of church — not the same building, necessarily, but buildings designed according to the same multi-scale principles. The private neighborhoods are sorted by practical necessity. The public infrastructure is where everyone meets.
This is where the design ethic of the public building does its most important work. The library with the tiered reading tables and the multi-height shelving is not just a library. It is the physical statement that a Vulpen's need to find a book is as legitimate as a Leonite's, and that both of them should be able to do it without navigating a space that treats them as an afterthought. The restroom with stalls for every size class is not just a restroom. It is the same statement, applied to a more basic necessity.
Cities that do this well become cities where the soft clustering of residential neighborhoods doesn't harden into something more divisive. The Giant-grade block and the Small-grade block remain distinct in their housing stock and their proportions. But their residents share public space designed to hold all of them, and that shared space has a way of making the distinctions between blocks feel like geography rather than division.
The Building as Statement
There is a version of multi-species architecture that gets this wrong, and it's worth naming because it doesn't look obviously wrong from the outside.
The wrong version builds public spaces that are technically accessible to every size class but not genuinely designed for any of them except the default. The default is usually Large-grade, which is the largest size class that doesn't require expensive structural modifications, and the result is a building where Large-grade users move through naturally while everyone else manages. The Giant-grade visitor stoops through doorways that are technically passable. The Vulpen uses the step provided near the counter, which wasn't there in the original plan and doesn't quite reach. The building is not hostile. It just wasn't really designed with those visitors in mind, and everyone who uses it can feel the difference.
The gap between that building and the grocery store on Flatbush is not primarily a gap in budget. It's a gap in design philosophy — in whether the architect, at the moment of planning, was asking "how do we make this work for everyone" or "how do we make this work and add accessibility features afterward." The first question produces the grocery store. The second produces the step stool near the deli counter that isn't quite at the right height.
The Imago Dei framework that underlies this world holds that every person, in every coat, bears the divine image fully. Not partially. Not in proportion to their size. Fully. A public building that takes that seriously looks different from one that treats it as a slogan. It has the tiered counter and the multi-height shelving and the restrooms that were planned from the start. It has the ceiling that doesn't feel like an accommodation because it was never designed as one.
The building is a statement about who it was built for. The best ones say: everyone.
— Eric Flegal
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
What public space do you think would be the most interesting to design for a multi-species world — and what would you do differently from how we build now? Tell me in the comments.
