The bathouse is a building for bats to live in, and for humans to get to know bats.It seemed a bit obvious to make it look like a bat, wrapped in triangular folds like a bat wrapped up in its wings. What would it hang from? Would it be an ever so overdone tensile structure?

We have designed a building which hangs from itself. A permeable skin of sustainable timber slats hangs from the topmost deck, its deep and thin beams providing slots of space into which the bats can crawl away. The lower decks hang from the screen, leaving slots around the tilting columns, making clear that the building is being borne from above, and making room for the inhabitants to enter from below. Within this skin is another layer of building, itself made out of layers of timber.

The bats to literally inhabit the spaces within the structure. Within the inner layer are a series of nesting boxes which we will develop with experts into a series of high quality bat apartments. Web based observation of life in the bat apartment buildings will be achieved quite easily.

The whole structure is sheltered by the spreading wings of the roof, the structure itself fully inhabitable, a warm space in summer between the corrugated metal and the plywood ceiling. The materials are sympathetic to the rural character of the wetland centre, and to budgetary constraints.