The Canine & Feline Hotel is located in Parada, Vila do Conde and the main program consists of temporary dog and cat accommodation, a hotel where the animals stay for a few days, during holidays or professional travel of their owners. The remaining program is a complement to the space’s activity, with a veterinary office, a grooming room, outdoor training areas and a swimming pool for pets.
The program is distributed over three buildings that are interconnected, allowing to create three different areas. This way we got to separate the cat zone from the dog zone, avoiding the meeting of both and reducing the animal noises. In another building we find all the public service spaces.
Seattle Humane’s mission of serving pets in need of shelter and respite was constrained by its small, 1960s-era facility. The organization sought to build a new animal shelter that would increase the number of pets it served while providing a base of operations for their community outreach and educational programs. At 57,000 SF, their new facility does just that, providing shelter for 165 cats and 170 dogs, a 35% increase in capacity. This allows Seattle Humane to take in more pets from high-kill shelters and provides an opportunity to place more pets with adoptive families.
To limit disruptions to operations and programming of this vital community nonprofit, the new building was constructed adjacent to the existing facility on the same site, allowing the shelter to remain open throughout construction.
Understanding the human-animal bond! Located in Playa Vista in California, Annenberg PetSpace ™ is unique. The Annenberg PetSpace is a technology-oriented community animal care facility featuring interactive spaces for pet adoptions, an education center, state of the art medical and physical therapy facility, and a leadership institute. The facility focuses on the mutually beneficial and dynamic bond between people and their pets, as well as the origins and science of that relationship. Complimenting these public adoption/education programs are carefully organized animal holding habitats designed to support both the physical and psychological needs of newly arrived animals as staff works with them to become well socialized and responsive companion animals. The 2-story LEED Platinum, 30,000 SF facility opened to the public in the summer of 2017.
We are constructing two animal-related buildings on the boundary between the industrial site Maatheide and the nature reserve the Lommelse Sahara: an animal shelter and a pet crematorium. The buildings lack an attractive public reputation, hence their relocation to the industrial site, which in turn, is not accustomed to house public buildings. As an architecture assignment, the programmes too are fairly unfamiliar and thus require research into new, meaningful typologies.
Both buildings are planned along the new road connecting the industrial site to the nature reserve behind it. Both the shelter and the crematorium were provided with an enclosed private outdoor space, evoking the image of two stamps in an unscathed landscape, while the actual parcel limits are consciously left unformalised.
A neighbourhood family had a redundant piece of land, and offered that to “Het Da Vinci College” , a school for animal care and gardening, with pupils who require additional support. They didn’t know where this would end, because there was a plot, lots of enthusiasm, involvement, from the school, neighbourhood and city council, but neither the skills, nor the money to realise the project. That’s where RO&AD architects stepped in. With help of the Province of Noord-Brabant, Visavis Landscape designers, who gave a small budget, they designed a plan which made it possible to be made by the teachers, the pupils, and the neighbourhood themselves. It is a 6 meters wide and 100 meters long timber structure, with relatively easy to make trusses, which are held together by nail plates. All rooms, like the classroom, animal room, greenhouses etc are placed in a row, without any room and money devouring things like halls or hallways. When Rini, a teacher at the school, saw this, he became so enthusiastic, that he offered to make the building himself. And that is what happened. He postponed his retirement for 2 years, and together with neighbours, students and lots of other people he started to work. Under the guidance of a contractor and the architects, he built the school, and the garden in 1 ½ year’s time. And it works! Neighbours are taking down their fences to get access to the school garden. They take care of the plants and the animals during the holidays, and the students finally have a place where they can be proud of to work on.
Panda House responds to the species’ main threats to extinction – habitat loss and fragmentation – by providing a safe and contiguous environment that’s also conducive for reproduction. We proposed a circular shape for the design – befitting the site perfectly between existing buildings and enabling the literal yin-yang symbol to create separate enclosures for male and female pandas. The architectural parts of the earth are then lifted from either side of the “yin” and “yang” to form space for stables belowground, simultaneously creating an incline to naturally face the pandas toward the audience.
Project Leaders: Nanna Gyldholm Møller, Ole Elkjær-Larsen, Kamilla Heskje
Team: Maja Czesnik, Pawel Bussold, Jinseok Jang, Gökce Günbulut, Christian Lopez, Luca Senise, Høgni Laksáfoss, Sofia Sofianou, Carlos Soria, Victor Bejenaru, Claus Rytter Bruun de Neergaard, Gabrielé Ubareviciute, Eskild Schack Pedersen, Richard Howis, Tore Banke, Tobias Hjortdal, Joos Jerne, Hanne Halvorsen, Tommy Bjørnstrup, Joanna Plizga
The Staten Island Animal Care Center is designed to encourage the adoption of animals while creating a humane and controlled environment during their stay. In addition, the program requires unique circulation patterns to provide for the routing and isolation of well, sick, and un-examined animals as they are processed and tended to. The building is sheathed in a highly insulating, translucent polycarbonate envelope that provides four times the insulating value of glass, maximizes the benefits of natural light, and allows for a very light weight structure.