To raise awareness and funds to address the 3 million feral cat population in Los Angeles, “Architects for Animals” recently tasked twelve local architects to design outdoor cat shelters. Their designs would then be put up for auction to benefit FixNation, a pro-spay and neuter nonprofit. Twelve firms in all, including HOK, Perkins + Will, Knowhow Shop, Standard Architects, RNL Design, Formation Association and more contributed designs – some of them deliciously whacky, others impressively practical to their feline program.
Check out the designs below (the model Tabby has already been adopted, so don't ask):
↑ Knowhow Shop
↑ HOK
↑ Standard Architecture & Design
↑ Lehrer Architects
↑ WORD + Schmidt Designs
↑ Perkins+Will
Check out the rest of the shelters in the image gallery.
15 Comments
Well, you know what they say: If you can't say anything nice, don't do anything but pull the terrified cat away from the bizarre non-functional objects and give it a warm blanket and food for chrissake.
haha Donna. Yeah these are awful.
I can't help but think that nobody who saw one of these would ever hire the architects to design a shelter for actual humans.
So I googled "cat house"... Rowrrr!
The Perkins + Will one looks pretty playful, and actually seems to provide shelter. Not so much the others...
dumb. if I were a cat I would spray on those pieces of suck.
I have a friend who, aside from her wonderful husband and children, could almost qualify as a crazy cat lady. She has a super cool, super functional, inexpensive little stray cat shelter on her porch, and in cold weather it definitely gets used. She bought it as a kit on the internet and I complimented her on the excellent design, to which she demurred and said it was purchased.
If they had marketed this competition as "cat play structures" they would all be wonderful! But as shelters? That's the most basic function of what we are tasked to provide as architects, and most of these fail pretty spectacularly at that. It's embarrassing.
I'm very worked up about this. Maybe *I'm* the one who's a crazy cat lady.
^ but Donna the dumb cats that use that cookie cutter shelter on your friends porch are uneducated strays that probably couldn't tell the villa Savoye from the local Petsmart. These are clearly for the cats that need more architectural stimulation.
Lame.
What is up with all the sharp edges, thin metal, and places for a cat to get its head and paws stuck?
Some of these will kill and/or maim an animal.
jla, have you tried listening to what the cat public wants? that's the problem with architects. they just don't listen to the cat public.
i'm pretty sure the shelter for the cat end-users is the climate controlled house they live in. also, they all suck. schmidt is the only one with a scratching post.
as a side note, have you seen canstruction? people (sometimes architects) take canned food and make sculptures. when they're done, the canned food goes to people who need canned food.
i feel like this kind of relates, because the canned food sculptures are equally useful to cats after they're built. the lifecycle cost of these is not very good. they're going to end up in a landfill or sitting in the corner of the house of someone who doesn't have cats.
The cat public typically wants the empty box or bag the carefully-selected and expensive cat-intended object came in.
It's like how buildings are almost always more appealing under construction than when finished.
curt the can-struction program is similar, but in the beginning of my architecture career (age 7) I once built my cat an enclosure on the patio out of leftover bricks and put her in it. One of the bricks fell on her leg, and that was a trip to the vet! The weight of cans stacked without proper tiebacks vs. a cat's size makes me wary.
Lets not confuse designing for a client with designing for an exhibition.
On the other hand, if something doesn't serve it's base function... it might be in the wrong exhibition.
this is the "what the cat public wants" cat
the cats love these things
http://www.standardarchitecture.com/work/cat-cube
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