Myrtle Mae Monday 03.23.09 -- guest post!

While my sister was visiting at the start of March, we chatted a great deal about home improvement issues, especially for the Happy Kitten Cottage.  One of Kitty's manifold concerns is preparing a suitable place for to house all future chicken acquisitions.  She attempted to sketch for me what she wanted her new chicken coop to look like, and then I made a sketch of my own.

The larger sketch is an elevation of the ideal chicken coop by Kitty.  It shows the coop with a few windows and a nesting bump-out on the left along with a chainlink chicken run on the right.  On the right of the image, I sketched a section through the coop to try to understand how the floor is missing (it's a deep mulch system, whatever the hell that is--Kitty says she'll get me more on how it works) and how tall the coop needs to and how the nesting niche/bumpout works.

It was at this point that we started joking around about what style to do the coop in.  Really, it should match the HKC, which is a two-wide mill house (two rooms wide all the way back), but then we started laughing about various starchitects designing chicken coops.  Why not? 

Aaaaaaauuugghhh!  Godzilla crapped some tinfoil!  Oh, no, wait...everybody relax, it's just a Frank Gehry building.  I mean, it's nice that Mr. Gehry gave us such a high-end coop, with the shiny titanium curvilinear panels and stuff.  However, for a $450/sf chicken coop, you think you can keep the water out?  (Non-fans of his Sata Center at MIT will get the jokes in the sketch.)

What phase is Philip Johnson in today?  Is he feeling like indulging in some postmodernist Chippendale furniture as a skyscraper cap?  Maybe he feels like emulating some early Liebskind, but with fiberglass instead of metal.  Ah, it looks like for nos poulets favoris, he's in his International Style I-love-Mies phase.  Sadly, the internal temperatures of Johnson's own Glass House reached as high as 106 degrees F, which means that actually keeping chickens in this coop will, well, fry them.  At least we can observe our feathered friends unhindered, unless they going into the brick nesting cylinder.

Ah, but what is this?  Some post-modern architecture parlant for our chicken coop?  And who would be so inclined to make a coop that a chicken would love?  Why, Michael Graves, of course.  Granted, it's a confused collection of literal chicken coop and a half-assed homage to Neoclassical Revival circa 1988, but still, it's so cute you could buy it at Target.

More Starchitect Chicken Coops next Monday.  Until then, keep your feathers preened and the yard cats on the run!