ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a discrete set of architectural spaces animal shelters built in the San Francisco bay area between 1991 and the present. It concerns aesthetics and its relationship to experience. These shelters uniquely stage, in aesthetic terms, domestication as a style, ideology, and a set of experiences. The chapter presents a close reading of several buildings where "homeless companion animals" as shelter dogs and cats are housed. It explains the non-profit agency, the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SF SPCA), was still under contract to the city, serving as the animal control branch of government and overseeing enforcement and regulation of local laws. The homeless dog's appearance in the window display allows it a kind of rebirth as an object of desire, now disassociated from the social problem of pet over-population and its complicated subplots of reproduction, species, breeding, laws, responsibility, geography, culture, urbanity, poverty, abandonment, and death.
