In Pohrebea, Moldova, a compact village reimagines domestic roles by housing goats in purpose-built micro-dwellings and situating human visitors in a separate camp on the hillside. The ensemble reads as a legible miniature city, where civic typologies and calibrated scenography structure interspecies encounters. Material decisions prioritize local earthen construction, salvage, and low embodied energy, aligning theatrical form with a durable, working ecology.
The City of Goats “Kozy” Technical Information
- Architects: LH47 ARCH
- Location: Pohrebea, Moldova
- Gross Area: 3,000 m2 | 32,292 Sq. Ft.
- Completion Year: 2020s
- Photographs: © George Omen
We combined goat therapy with architecture. This is neither a zoo nor a farm. It is a place where people step into the lives of animals. When roles are reversed, our ideas about what architecture can do change completely.
– Serghei Mirza
Interspecies Urbanism: Reversing Domestic Hierarchies
The settlement positions goats as full-time occupants of micro-dwellings while people reside temporarily in tents on a separate hillside. This inversion reframes domestic expectations. Architecture becomes a medium for role negotiation rather than a static container for familiar human routines. The goat houses are scaled to their users, configured as discrete addresses along lanes, and fitted to patterns of feeding, resting, and care. The nearby human camp provides comfort without collapsing the species boundary, so visitors read the village as a place already in use by others.
A civic morphology anchors the plan. A town hall, post office, police station, tourist office, and grocery form an intelligible urban core that organizes circulation and choreographs daily loops of care and observation. These recognizable types enable visitors to navigate by analogy, keeping animal needs at the center. A local currency and programmatic satire at the settlement edge function as soft planning tools. They regulate thresholds, define moments of contact, and maintain a buffer between husbandry zones and public itineraries without resorting to heavy-handed barriers.
Material Strategy and Construction Ecology
Goat houses are constructed using straw, clay, and lime, along with salvaged terracotta tiles, reclaimed timber, and stone. The assembly leverages local craft and short supply chains, reducing embodied energy while producing stable interior conditions through thermal mass and hygroscopic behavior. Small spans, low eaves, and thick walls yield robust envelopes sized to the scale of animals. Fixings are minimized or made serviceable, anticipating repair and adjustment rather than permanence.
Reuse from dismantled structures introduces traces of prior occupation. Weathered timber, irregular tiles, and stone courses retain a visible patina, resisting nostalgic pastiche by making age legible rather than imitating it. The result is a fabric in which difference reads as history. Variation in tile color, limewash tone, and joinery detail offers texture without erasing consistency of type and scale.
Vapor-permeable earthen and straw layers demand careful detailing. Raised plinths, capillary breaks, and generous roof overhangs protect the base course. Lime plasters and washes maintain breathability while shedding rain. Interior surfaces at goat height are best suited for abrasion-resistant finishes and easily replaceable boards. Ventilation louvres and shaded openings limit heat stress, and cleaning regimes are supported by graded thresholds, drainage falls, and service taps set outside animal reach. Material choice is thus directly tied to welfare, maintenance cycles, and the realities of a weather-exposed working environment.
Site Planning, Scale, and Programmatic Zoning
Within a 3,000-square-meter site, buildings line compact lanes and small courts, producing clear sightlines and controlled cross-views. Compositional axes are short, so the village reads at a walking pace. The human camp is situated uphill at a measured distance, providing visitors with a panoramic view of the layout without encroaching on animal territory. This separation preserves routine while allowing close observation at defined moments along the lanes.
Zoning distinguishes the civic core from cultural and edge programs. The gallery occupies a quieter pocket, where slower visitor dwelling is compatible with animal rhythms. A satirical gaming venue and other high-noise functions are positioned at the perimeter, allowing sound and density to dissipate outward. Points of contact are limited and choreographed around a petting area and a grocery store focused on feed, with holding zones, handwashing stations, and staff-access routes embedded into the plan. Services and waste management move along back lanes to avoid crossings with public paths.
Domestic signifiers placed within goat houses operate as scenography rather than furnishings. Chandeliers, books, and globes are positioned behind windows or beyond low partitions, read primarily as layered backdrops. Deep sills, mesh screens, and robust frames preserve the tableau while protecting animals and components. Natural light, cross-ventilation, and bedding zones remain the primary functional drivers, ensuring that visual narrative never overrides husbandry standards.
Aesthetic Framework and Representational Logic
The village uses calibrated palettes, bilateral alignments, and frontal compositions to create a coherent visual grammar. Symmetry and measured color contrasts simplify reading at a small scale and support wayfinding. Facades emphasize portals, cornice lines, and crisp shadow edges, encouraging a photographic mode of looking that clarifies figure-ground relationships across lanes and squares.
Micro-architecture and repeatable types deliver order with room for variation. A limited kit of parts, including door modules, sash proportions, porch profiles, and tile formats, produces rhythmic consistency while accommodating iterative façades. Typological discipline keeps the architecture sized to animal occupants, preventing the city image from overwhelming the domestic grain of the pens and shelters.
Theatricality is deployed as a didactic tool. Familiar civic forms are reassigned to non-human users, turning visitors into an audience confronted with questions of authorship and address. By staging the city as already claimed by its residents, the project tests how representation mediates interspecies relationships. The set-like reading does not end at the surface; it structures behaviors, protocols, and expectations, demonstrating how aesthetic choices can shape ethical and spatial outcomes in a shared environment.
About LH47 ARCH
Based in Moldova and founded in the 2020s, LH47 ARCH is a leading architecture practice known for blending sustainable design with narrative-driven aesthetics. Their work often explores the intersection of ecological construction and cultural expression, as seen in projects like The City of Goats “Kozy“, which reimagines architectural defaults by reversing human-animal domestic hierarchies through material intelligence and scenographic spatial planning.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: LH47 ARCH, Kozy cofounders
- Project team: Serghei Mirza, Nikolai Grozdev, Vladislav Petrika, Maria Shova, Vadim Fonariuc, Alexandrina Postolachi
- Photographs: George Omen
