Home for Homelessness: A Dog Shelter Where Homeless People Become the Staff and the Residents

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This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "Home for Homelessness: A Dog Shelter Where Homeless People Become the Staff and the Residents" about?

This article covers topics related to Residential Building, Architecture. One looping, half-buried building houses stray dogs, homeless caretakers and a food bank, and lets arc walls decide who shares space with whom.

One looping, half-buried building houses stray dogs, homeless caretakers and a food bank, and lets arc walls decide who shares space with whom.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Residential Building, Architecture on Oct 10, 2026

Animal shelters rarely have enough hands, and cities rarely have enough rooms for the people they push to the margins. Most architecture treats these as two separate problems with two separate budgets. This project treats them as one: the people who need a bed and the dogs who need a keeper can meet each other's needs, if the building lets them live close enough.

Home for Homelessness, designed by Jiamin Huang and Yunghan Chan, is a shelter for stray animals, homeless people and food close to expiry. Its main job is adoption, but it also houses local homeless people and employs them as the shelter's staff, so they can work and live in society with dignity. The project received the Editor's Choice at Strays 2020.

A Semi-Underground Spine Cut by Curved Walls

The exploded axonometric explains the whole idea in one drawing. A long, straight, steel-framed volume runs across the site, partly sunk into the ground, and a sequence of large circular loops swings off it on alternating sides. Thin accommodation bars lift above this base on their own frames. Inside, the team divides programme with curved walls instead of corridors and doors, so each zone bleeds into the next and the outside slides into the interior through the open arcs.

The red trees scattered over the plan and the red arcs drawn along the walls do quiet work: they read the loops as courtyards rather than leftover space. The building is a line, but the experience of it is a chain of rooms open to the sky.

Exploded axonometric drawing separating roof, steel frames, floor plates and the sunken plan of a long looping building with red trees. Image: Jiamin Huang, Yunghan Chan

In the Lodging Strip, a Wave Wall Splits Beds from Pens

The most persuasive drawing in the set is the section through the lodging strip. A continuous wall bends up and down like a sine wave between floor and ceiling. Where it rises, a person sits on a wooden cabinet topped with pillows; where it dips, a dog lies behind a railing. People and animals occupy the same long room, at the same height, on the same floor, and the curve alone decides which side is which.

This is a smart reversal of the usual shelter, where animals sit in rows of cages and staff pass by on a separate path. Here the caretaker literally sleeps next to the animals in their care, separated by a line rather than a corridor. It is also the drawing that invites the hardest question about privacy, rest and noise.

Section drawing of looping circular wall segments holding dog pens, wooden cabinets and pillows, with a person sitting and another bending over. Image: Jiamin Huang, Yunghan Chan

The Sunken Plaza as a Shared Yard

Below grade, the loops open into a sunken plaza bounded by a red brick wall. The facade facing it is almost entirely glass, a long run of black-framed panels under a row of heavy rounded forms. Painted circles mark out play zones on the ground, and the rendering fills them with people bending to greet dogs, a woman crouching inside a pack of puppies, and animals resting against the brick.

Sinking the yard does two things at once. It gives dogs a contained outdoor run without a fence line, and it gives people living below street level a protected place to be outside. The glass frontage keeps the indoor activity visible from the yard, which turns daily care into something seen and shared rather than hidden in the back of the building.

Rendering of the sunken plaza with a red brick wall, glazed kennel frontage and dogs running across the painted ground beneath a tree. Image: Jiamin Huang, Yunghan Chan

A Kennel Wall Punctured with Arches

The kennel view pushes the curved language into the facade itself. A gray wall of ribbed concrete-like bays is cut at the base with small arched openings, each fronted by a low gate, so dogs can slip between their pens and the yard. Above, the lodging strip rides along the skyline with its own arched windows, and one wider opening swells into a keyhole-shaped porch with steps where a dog sits in the shade.

In the foreground, a man waves to the dogs from behind a curving white rail that wraps a red brick volume. The scene is staged, but the spatial claim holds: the people who live here look down onto the animals they work with, and the animals have their own doorways scaled to them.

Collage rendering of the gray kennel wall with arched dog openings, a curved red brick rail and a man waving to dogs under cloudy sky. Image: Jiamin Huang, Yunghan Chan

View of the kennels. Image: Jiamin Huang, Yunghan Chan

The Logistics Hall Where Work, Food and Adoption Overlap

The logistics area is the social core. White chairs and round black tables fill a broad floor where dogs wander between visitors and residents. A red brick mezzanine with a sweeping white staircase hangs over the room, and a raised platform on the right lets a dog watch from above. The description's third user, food close to expiry, finds its place in this part of the building: the shelter works as a small food bank that feeds both its people and its animals.

The density of this mix is exactly what divided opinion. Bas ten Brinke, CEO and senior architect at 70F architecture in The Netherlands, who judged the competition, admired the premise but questioned how tightly it was packed:

I find it a very promising idea mixing homeless people with a shelter. It was high on my list but lost it by creating such a dense mix and unrealistic solution for this mix; if you would have taken that a bit more loose it could have worked. Nice and smart presentation!Bas ten Brinke, Ceo / senior architect, 70F architecture, The Netherlands

Interior rendering of the logistics area with white chairs, round tables, dogs and people, and a red brick mezzanine with a curving staircase. Image: Jiamin Huang, Yunghan Chan

Why This Project Matters

Home for Homelessness argues that a building type can be redefined by who runs it. By making homeless people the shelter's workforce and its residents, the design turns a chronic staffing problem into a housing programme, and it uses a single formal device, the arc wall, to express that people and animals share the same ground. That clarity is why the project stands out in a field of shelters that design only for animals.

The jury's caution is the right lesson to carry forward. Coexistence works best with room to breathe: thresholds that can be closed, distances that can grow, and spaces where caretakers can step away from their charges. The idea is strong enough to survive a looser hand, and a looser plan may be what makes it buildable.