This multifunction facility serves as the main cat shelter and adoption space for FurKids, the largest no-kill animal shelter in Atlanta, Georgia. This building serves as the main adoption outlet and includes a cat café, multifunction event/open adoption space, and interactive educational components.
There were several design challenges, one of them being the required separation between various functions which had to result in a multi-building form. To do this, three pitched roofs were connected by two flat roof portions and a unifying porch condition, which stays at the same height around the entire building.
The second challenge was the integration of the exterior cat porches that wouldn’t look like exterior cat cages. By designing them as a façade portion of the building they became integral to the design from the beginning. This way the roof of the main building ties in and becomes the same roof over the cat porches. The same design language was used when designing the cat café porch to help keep a unified look to the structure.
The grand adoption room was the last challenge as the client wanted tall ceilings with exposed trusses and a lot of glass. To keep the project within budget the BLUR Workshop design team utilized a modified engineered truss clad on the front and back with 1X GA cypress. That same cypress was used all over the project for both the black wood siding and the natural wood on the exterior and the interior.
Because the client wanted a building that would be as maintenance-free as possible the design team utilized thermo kiln-dried incredibly rot-resistant cypress wood.
To work with the pristine nature of the wooded site, when designing this building local materials were used, and a water management system that would give back to the surrounding flora was employed.
The majority of the exterior cladding is either black stained or has natural thermo kiln-dried Ga cypress. This special drying process removes all
of the oxygen from the wood therefore making it extremely resistant to rot and bug infestation. This allows the cladding to be both locally sourced and very maintenance-free.
For water management, all of the pitched roofs were made gutter-less and therefore directly shed onto the ground. To make this work BLUR Workshop extended the soffit/fascia so the water would not hit the siding of the building. Then a perforated pipe was added 2ft underground right below the line of the fascia above. This perforated pipe takes all of the pitched roof water and distributes it out to the surrounding site below the planted areas. The area above the perforated pipe is then backfilled with a slate chip to allow the water from the roof to freely make its way down to the pipe.
