Lilly Donohue

The Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society Collaboration Project

When we were initially given the assignment to work as a group on the mass production of an object to be distributed to a community, It was very important to me to establish a relationship with a specific community before thinking about designing an object. One of the aspects of Architecture that has always been exciting to me is the interaction that occurs with a variety of people over the course design process. We communicate with the client, engineers, contractors, other people in the community; and all of these conversations develop a narrative and a history that changes and shapes the actual design of the building itself.

My brief encounters of product design have always been frustrating for this same reason. For me, they have centered on the preoccupation with just creating a beautiful object to be enjoyed by this or that demographic as opposed to a specific connection with a group of people who influence the design process.

After considering a variety of local communities, our group centered in on the Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society. This seemed like a great choice because of the intensity of its existing infrastructure (tons of programs as highlighted in the "Project Desrciption"), but also because it raised this question about the relationship between people and animals; the nature of domesticity versus the wild. As we further researched this organization and learned more about their feral cat feeding program, this just seemed like an even more fascinating issue. The idea that within this substantial group of people, individuals go out each week and circulate to these disparate locations in order to feed these animals that they never actually come into physical contact with was just extraordinary to me. The way that though these people, their circulation starts to create relationships between these varied places as it is repeated week after week, year after year is amazing. Actually locating the positioning of these individual cat colonies through mapping became a really intriguing way of showing the symbolic relationships that had developed as a result of this human and animal movement through space.

The whole group also became fascinated by the feeding stations themselves. The thing that was so intriguing for me about the station relative to the class and everything that we had been discussing was that it was this amazing symbolic object on so many levels. It serves as the single physical point of contact between these people and the cats that they spend so much time and effort caring for, but never really develop a reciprocal relationship with, so in that respect it develops symbolism purely through its function. But in its appearance, it looks like a house, so its actual typology is symbolic of the desire of these people to ascribe a certain level of domesticity on these "wild" animals.

The other heavily symbolic object for me was the cat's ear. The ear is clipped after the cat is neutered, providing an exterior indication of its interior transformation. This act symbolically positions these animals as existing in some state between wild and domestic. Their bodies have been altered in order to control their reproduction, they are located within a colony that is being fed by humans; and yet they have no desire to establish a connection with these humans as would be the case with a domesticated animal.

Another aspect of the project that was interesting for me was to work in a group on an art project. I have worked with groups in a variety of other disciplines, including architecture, but all of the art I have created has always been highly personal and never the result of a collaboration. It was difficult to coordinate so many interests and opinions. Ultimately though, I think that we were able to work together really well, and that the actual act of collaborating became yet another layer in this incredibly complex series of relationships that began to develop from working on this project.

The design and fabrication of the objects themselves was probably the most difficult part of this project. We all had so many ideas and directions that we wanted to pull this thing in because we each already had a great deal invested in the project at that point. I think our decision to embrace the production of an object that could serve these people, and could further symbolize their connection to each other, the cats, the community, the physical locations of the feeding stations, etc. was an effective way of pulling together the mass production component of the project.

I really got a lot from working on this project. It was kind of amazing to become submerged in this whole community and these individual lives that were so separate from my own sphere of thinking. I found that once I stepped into this culture, it was easy to see how these people get obsessed. Perhaps my obsessions are slightly more critical and voyeuristic than the feral cat feeders, but none-the-less, I feel like there is some aspect to this intense, networked, community that germinates obsession upon its exploration.

The last thing I will add is just that this writing itself, the act of being personal about my connection to a project or experience was another element that I actually took from the class. We never do this in architecture, and actually having studied art a bit—I rarely did it then either. I think I've somehow been conditioned to believe that personal is somehow illegitimate, so is strange to expose my personal interests or responses to the project, but I have enjoyed doing it.