A building is to an architect what an album is to a musician or band. Now, excuse us for extending the analogy when we say that the façade of a building is like the sleeve cover of an album — it is (kinda). A sleek façade is integral to the experience of moving through a building just as an album’s artwork — yes, even now in the digital age — changes how you hear a record, at least for the first few times.

South by Southwest kicks off today in Austin, Texas, and to console ourselves for being stuck in wintry New York, we’ve combined our two loves of music and architecture. (No, not this.) Here are 20 album covers whose jewel-cases prominently feature architecture. From world-famous landmarks to surreal, fantasy structures, these cardboard buildings are candy for your eyes (and ears!). Click through! 

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Tin Hut, by designer Kathryn Walton, founder of the American Street Cat. 

Cats can be finicky clients, with mysterious preferences that add up to an almost universal rejection of the carpet platforms and plush beds humans design for them. So when several New York architects set out to design winter shelters for the city’s tens of thousands of feral cats, they had to consider what makes good design from a feline perspective. In a competition organized by Architects for Animals to benefit the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, seven architecture firms (and one independent designer) found inspiration in outdoor carpeting, Spanish moss, and aluminum cat-food cans. So how did they go about attracting the street cats of New York, short of hiding warm, charging MacBooks all over the city? Check out some of our favorite designs after the jump!

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Reinterpreting the scaffolding from his own House NA project, Sou Fujimoto has created a new home for the popular Boston terrier.

Dogs are a man’s best friend, right? We’ve made no attempt to hide our love of these faithful, four-legged friends—just have a gander out our favorite pet “pawjects” for proof. So it only makes sense that we celebrate our furry companions by providing them with the most aesthetically heady, functionally sound homes! Cue the Kenya Hara-curated project “Architecture for Dogs.” Hara’s initiative tasked renowned architects such as Toyo Ito, Shigeru Ban, and MVRDV with the design of 11 new dog houses. The results? Quite fun, actually.

Click through to see all of the pet-friendly designs.

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This week saw the news of the $100,000 Neiman Marcus chicken coop that made us call, well, fowl. Still, we put our reservations aside and went about searching for other instances of “Architecture + Animals”. Now, we’re back with 10 “structures” that would make any cultivated pet swoon.

Most of the projects have a quasi-modernist bent, while others make use of pomo elements like gables to communicate “home” to their furry and feathered occupants. Some are sculptural–in all senses of the word–artfully shaping space for chickens, ponies, and fish alike. Judging from the photographs, the critters seem quite happy in their new digs. Click through for the slideshow!

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Images courtesy of  Galula Studio

Portuguese product design studio Galula has created a new line of furniture that seems to have come straight out of Mother Goose’s book of nursery rhymes. Designed to welcome the birth of a new baby, the Tio is a storage unit intended to “keep and share moments, memories, secrets…”  Read more.

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The Poncelet Cheese Bar by Gabriel Corchero Studio; All photos: Mugutu

One of the many playful details in the new Poncelet Cheese Bar in Madrid, Spain is the kaleidoscopic mural at the heart of the space, whose flattened geometry carries hints of Buckminster Fuller interspersed with playschool color books. The mural acts as a focal point, referencing other similar gestures sprinkled all around the gastropub, including the cascading cedar wood facade and the greenery of the interior vertical garden.

The bar was designed by multidisciplinary firm Gabriel Corchero Studio, which oversaw the design and execution of nearly all the bar’s contents, from the cheese stands to the furniture to the shop’s custom cheese cellar. The latter is described as ”a rough diamond emerging from the ground” and was specially crafted out of cedar wood with glass inserts and outfitted with the latest technology to manage the temperature and humidity, forming a kind of cheese trophy case that’s the shop’s centerpiece. Other key elements incorporated into the design such as the aforementioned façade, the pair of Corian bars and a myriad of irreverent animal chotchkies help this Spanish Gastropub embrace an wide array of guests, both foodie and designer alike.

[via Mugutu]

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Modernism. We know it’s not just for humans. The clean-lined aesthetic of our “machines for living” has been popping up for seemingly every kingdom, phylum and class. The latest to catch our eye are a series of modernist birdhouses by Twig & Timber. Hand built using reclaimed materials, these avian homes eschew the classic gabled form and snub excessive ornamentation. Instead, they delight in simple forms accented with tasteful asymmetries and natural hues and grains. The results are clean, bold, uncluttered designs that are sure to pop beautifully against the rugged bark of a tree. Find these one-off birdhouses from Twig & Timber here on Etsy. And for more modernist pet architecture, check out our Pinterest!

[All images courtesy Twig & Timber, via Etsy]

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Photo via.

We’ve probably all heard of them before: students who go through architecture school not to become architects but to acquire that coveted brand of spatial thinking that comes with an architecture education. Though it seems like a roundabout way of getting from point A to B, the increasingly common approach points to how far architecture can depart from its vocational origins. Can this versatility of study translate into a versatility of practice? In West Des Moines, Iowa, the answer is yes.

According to the Des Moines Register, the city saw a problem in its derelict animal control facility, a converted two-stall garage that has been around for over three decades. When the facility was built, the city had a population of 20,000, explained animal control officer Carol Gass. The population now hovers around 110,000, and the roughly 600 pets that are corralled into the facility each year are in dire need of a new structure. In response, the City Council has contracted Des Moines-based OPN Architects for $61,700 to “conduct an analysis of the city’s need for a new pound, propose potential sites for the facility, and establish a basic shelter design.”

The facility itself, which will likely support the shelter needs of neighboring Clive and Urbandale, is predicted to cost between $1 million and $1.5 million. What is interesting is that OPN was contracted largely to conduct research, to apply their architectural expertise to first and foremost evaluate context and site. The ‘basic shelter design’ is merely a step in a larger process. After all, West Des Moines is not looking to replace their current shelter with a Taj Mahal, says David Whitney, who runs a local animal hospital. “We need a facility where you wouldn’t lose sleep if your animal was left there for a night,” he said. ‘Right now, we don’t have that.”

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Animals on the Underground is an on-going project that casts the London Underground as a wild menagerie of elusive animals, who disappear in and out the thicket of abstract lines which comprise the map of the Tube. The project began in 1988, when the first animal, the elephant, was spotted. Since then a vast array of critters, both wild and domesticated, has been added to the roster of subterranean animals, from playful dogs and soaring pigeons to strutting baby rhinos and quiescent sperm whales. Their form and features are determined by the strokes and folds of the map’s meandering beveled-edge lines, with the creatures sometimes fitting snugly within the Underground’s negative spaces but more frequently extending across the city’s skewed geography to encompass a whole series of train lines. New animals are constantly revealing themselves, so one must be always on the lookout. Click through to see more.

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Upon seeing Jacques de Vaucanson’s infamous shitting duck (“Canard Digérateur”), Voltaire proclaimed the inventor to be the “new Prometheus,” a veritable creator of novel inorganic, i.e. mechanical, forms of life. The duck convincingly simulated bodily movements, such as craning its neck and drinking water through its beak, but was, in fact, neither capable of digestion nor defecation. Despite this, the mythic aura surrounding Vaucanson’s animal resonated with the culture’s fascination with the philosophical implications and technological promise of Cartesian automata.

To some extent, Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures, the “Strandbreests,” are the progeny of Vaucanson’s and Descartes’ machines. Upon first inspection, Jansen’s creatures, which are made of yellow PVC tubing laced with electric “feelers” operated by a primitive computing system, seem less than far removed from the 18th-century technology that made possible the automated duck. Jansen’s insistence on the binomial nomenclature with which he taxonomizes his creations too recalls the hybrid rationalism of the Enlightenment period. The artist engineer even goes so far as to  empathize with the biblical Creator, who, in Jansen’s story, has had millions of years of evolutionary activity to develop his work; given the same time, Jansen says, he too would produce a more perfect array of organisms. As it is, he has accrued just 21 years of experience building his wind-powered animals–needless to say, just an infinitesimal blip on the cosmic temporal radar. But he has recently embraced 3d-printing technology as a means of ensuring the reproductive future of his animal species. Read on.

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