Momo — Kaiju-Toy Cartoon Cat, Designer Store, Los Angeles

This store sells small plastic monsters to adults, and it has been doing so since before that was a respectable way to spend money. The owner wanted one large monster, outside, that would be the same joke told at a different volume.

The brief

A cat, because he has one. But built using the design grammar of a Japanese monster toy: heavy planted stance, spiky dorsal plates, a mouth full of blunt triangular teeth and a grin that has no business on a cat.

Toy grammar at architectural scale

Designer monsters are built to be legible in a hand. Scale one up to 2.8 m without changing anything else and it becomes dull, because the eye can suddenly see all the detailing it could not see before. So the detailing was removed.

The plates along the spine number seven, all the same simple spiked profile, diminishing front to back at a fixed rate. The teeth are eleven shapes, each a blunt triangle with no variation. The eyes are two perfect circles with no pupils in them at all. There is no fur, no whiskers, no claw detail and no pattern anywhere. Everything the piece has to say it says with silhouette.

The annoying engineering

The stance was the hard part. A wide four-legged stance with a heavy body wants to sag in the middle, and fibreglass over a steel frame will sag if the frame is not carrying the load properly. The armature runs a spine rail the length of the body, with a diagonal brace down each leg, and the belly is a separate laminated panel bonded on afterwards so the underside stays flat.

Colour

Lime green body, orange plates, cream belly. These are the colours of the first toy the owner ever collected, and there was no discussion about them.

On the apron

It is bolted to a steel sub-frame under the concrete and lit from two low ground-level fittings after dark, which the store installed themselves. It has become the address. Customers now say they will meet you at the big green cat, which is a better landmark than a street number has ever been.