Wuhan renovation design adopt stray animals base area

The adoption-area renovation of a stray-animal rescue base in Wuhan is a pro bono project led by the Luhu A8 Design Center together with the Asia for Animals Coalition and the Wuhan Small Animal Protection Association, covering 150 square metres outdoors and 30 square metres indoors. The base, run by association president Du Fan and his team in Qingshan District, houses more than 400 stray dogs; before the renovation, prospective adopters simply stood outside the kennel fence amid continuous barking to choose a puppy, and the interior route from the gate to the adoption yard was cluttered with storage, offices and miscellaneous items. Working within a very tight charitable budget, the architect Li Tao decomposed the adoption journey into arrival, meeting, choosing, signing, photographing and leaving. The decisive threshold - the moment adopters cross from inside to outside and return with a dog - became the project's central ritual, interpreted as "rescue plus going home", and is expressed by a rotating door that gives the adopted dog a symbolic passage into a warm home. A low window sill at the entrance was designed as the photo spot for successful adopters; on the first Sunday after completion, a mother and daughter photographed there with a dog named Xiao Mei, and the circular light of the rotating door behind them formed an accidental halo. Inside, to keep costs down, 600-by-600-millimetre terrazzo tiles were run up as a 1.2-metre wainscot in a bold, high-contrast pattern, above which a cheap cork bulletin board absorbs donated stickers and posters into a composed "kindness wall". Outdoors, the requirement to visually isolate the adoption yard from the 400-dog colony led to a modular "big cage" built from 40-by-40-millimetre galvanized square tubing and enclosed with translucent polycarbonate sheets, sandwiched between the base's two existing buildings. Four small trees planted by Du Fan and volunteers when the base opened were retained. One side becomes an interaction yard with existing trees; the other is a row of four 2-by-3-metre kennels, each supported on a two-metre column grid carrying a five-metre roof - an unusually slender, lightweight proportion. Tilted upper-hung windows are propped open with traditional wooden window stays, and glass openings let puppies sniff visitors. A red-orange colour chosen later for visibility, plus a small dog-head sculpture on the roof, makes the base visible from the last highway bridge. Completed in December 2021, the project is modest in scale but rich in narrative, turning scarce charitable funds into a space that raises adoption rates and public goodwill.