It’s 6:30 on a Monday evening, and a small team of architects at M Moser Associates has stayed late at their Park Avenue offices to study a 3-D model of a home they’ve designed for a client. The model on the screen shows several pods, each about 2-feet wide by 2-feet tall, held above the ground by rods. “Having sloped roofs obviously will be very beneficial, especially in snow,” Charlton Hutton, 29, a senior designer at the firm, explains. “And we’re building in a cutout for the caretaker to put in food.”
All this engineering ingenuity is in service of unusual clients: feral cats. Three years ago, the Mayor’s Alliance for New York City’s Animals started the Architects for Animals program, tasking local designers to come together annually to build eye-catching outdoor shelters for the city’s estimated 2 million street cats.
This year, after Hurricane Sandy, many of the city kitties that live on their own are especially in need of shelter. “Just about every feral colony in all effected areas floated away or were destroyed,” says Mike Phillips, co-founder of the Urban Cat League, an organization that works to care for and protect the city’s street cats. (Many in the animal community believe that not all feral cats are suitable for adoption and that many of them, especially those born on the street, are best served by being allowed to remain outdoors and untamed, with some human care.)
Ten teams from architectural firms across the city, including M Moser Associates, unveiled their structures at a cocktail event on Thursday. On Friday, they were delivered to feral-cat colonies in the five boroughs. The structures will stay in place for at least one year, and a feral-cat caretaker will feed and monitor the cat colony that inhabits it.
While there are thousands of rudimentary cat shelters installed by concerned cat lovers around the city, the high-design kitty habitats aim to do more.
By being “creative and flashy,” they “fulfill our mission of drawing attention to and compassion for cats living on the street by their wits,” says Phillips.
“We raise awareness through design,” enthuses Aleksey Shafiro, 33, a technical designer at M Moser and one of the three teammates behind the firm’s shelter. “If someone sees our cathouse and it looks good and it’s well designed, they’re gonna ask about it.”
The hope is that when people see these shelters, they’ll be inspired to become part of the solution many advocate: Trapping and neutering the cats and then returning them to their colonies.
But, the shelters don’t just need to look flashy, they need to be functional. Shafiro, Hutton and senior designer Jessie Bukewicz, 30, did extensive research on feral-cat colonies to determine what makes an ideal shelter. “When we work with our clients in our office, we don’t just build them a space and say, ‘This is what you have to live in,’ we try to understand who our clients are,” Hutton says.
Hutton and Bukewicz, both cat owners, know felines love to climb, so they decided to go vertical with their shelter by designing two pods, one slightly higher than the other. Each pod has an entryway, an overhang, and a slot for a food bowl. For insulation during the winter, Bukewicz obtained waterproof polypropylene foam panels donated by the Robin Reigi material company, who sponsored the team. Inside, each pod is lined with carpet donated by InterfaceFLOR.
Perhaps the most innovative part of M Moser’s design is that it allows for digital monitoring. By mounting a camera on or around the shelter, the M Moser team can watch the cats from a distance. “It’s one thing to build it and say that they use it, but it’d be nice to find out if they actually do use it,” says Shafiro.