Liberec architecture students design housing for bats

Liberec - Housing for bats is being designed by architecture students at the Technical University of Liberec as part of their semester projects. This animal-themed assignment was not the first for the students in the atelier of deputy dean Jiří Suchomel. In the past, they have designed housing for elephants or a butterfly pavilion. It is a good warm-up for new students to try to create a building for creatures other than humans, Suchomel told ČTK today. He was inspired by a competition for the design of bat accommodations by the River Thames in London.
    A group of five first-year students has the task of designing a Cheerful House for bats. The shelters should provide bats with summer and winter refuge while also allowing zoologists access inside for research on these mammals, monitoring, protection, or banding. According to Martin Pudil, zoologist at the North Czech Museum in Liberec, bats are not easy clients. "They are very demanding and they don’t like just anywhere; it can never be guaranteed whether they will occupy the new building. For instance, birds are much less demanding when it comes to housing," Pudil told ČTK.
    Similar projects are necessary, according to Pudil, because the natural places where bats can live are decreasing in nature. "Paradoxically, forest species of bats are in the worst condition, as they use tree hollows for shelter,” he noted. However, there are increasingly fewer old trees with hollows in the forests, which is why experts are trying to offer bats wooden boxes. "Only 20 to 30 percent of them, however, are occupied by bats," Pudil added.
    The students have already completed the first phase of work - an overall view of integrating the shelter into the landscape. They still have a second presentation and feedback from their professors ahead of them, and in the second half of November, they must submit their completed semester project. They are making models of bat accommodations in stages and gradually enlarging them.
    "It is an interesting project. I proposed a model of a very intricate bat interior and a simple house on the slope from the outside so that it does not disturb the surrounding character of the landscape," explained Karel Balšan, the author of one of the projects.
    Housing for bats is not the only unusual endeavor of Jiří Suchomel's atelier. A few years ago, his students gained fame for models of bridge structures made from spaghetti. TUL students Jitka Pucandlová and Miroslav Němeček built a construction weighing 115 grams and spanning one meter in November 2004, which held a weight of two kilograms in the “lightest bridge” category. In a global competition at Canada’s Okanagan University College, they then achieved fifth place for their structure.