ohmidog!

Barkitecture Houston, a two-day fundraiser that features some innovative interpretations on that old standard, the dog house, will begin Oct. 26.

This year’s benefit, for Pup Squad Animal Rescue, promises to be bigger than ever, with more than 20 dog house designs being featured, along with a full slate of activities for dogs and humans.

The fundraiser calls on local artists, designers and architects to create stylish and functional dog houses, which are then sold at auction. It’s in its fourth-year running, according to the Houston Press.

Last year’s event brought in $18,000 for the animal rescue group.

“Houston is definitely a dog town, but there’s also a huge problem of overpopulation,” said Julie Landry, co-founder of Pup Squad. “It’s just a matter of getting the message out, to spay and neuter your pets.”

This year, the festivities kick off with a “yappy hour,” on Friday, October 26. On Saturday, the dog houses will line the two blocks of the Houston Pavilions. Attendees can bid on their favorites, or buy them for $500. Judges will select the “Best in Show.”

The Houston Press previewed this year’s entries, which included a giant rescue chopper that  lights up, a doghouse with a roof drainage system that collects water, and a colorful fan of a dog house that folds up like a briefcase.

We’re pretty sure none of them, though, have what a dog house in Houston needs most — air conditioning! 

Here’s where you can find more information.

(Photos: Some of last year’s entries; Rachel Bohanan / Houston Press)

The city council in Elephant Butte, New Mexico, has scheduled a meeting this month on what to do about Blue — an Australian cattle dog who doesn’t have a home and apparently doesn’t want one.

Blue’s not totally destitute. He has an air conditioned dog house, $1,800 in savings, a Facebook page and a lawyer, who’s now working to get him an exemption from local leash laws so he can continue his free and rambling lifestyle.

Abandoned as a puppy 10 years ago, Blue, also known as Bluedog, was left at Casa Taco and cared for by the owner, who died two years ago, according to the Associated Press.

Janice Conner, co-owner of Butte General Store and Marina, took over feeding Blue after that. But when a citizen complained about Blue following her and her dog on walks, someone in the city decided that Blue should receive a citation for being off leash, and issued it to Conner’s husband, Bob Owen.

Albuquerque attorney Hilary Noskin offered her legal services, and is trying to get Owen, who doesn’t officially own the dog, off the hook — and win an exemption that would allow Blue to live out the rest of his years, preferably untethered, in front of the store he now calls home.

“He’s one of my favorite clients,” says Noskin. “He is a sweet, sweet dog. He doesn’t meet any vicious dog standards. Somebody said he snarls … but I am not sure I believe that.”

City Manager Alan Briley says the city has received complaints about Blue snapping and growling and almost being hit by cars crossing the street.

Blue has resisted efforts to adopt him, always making his way back to  the store. Local residents have donated more than $1,800 his care, Conner said, and they’ve also built him a dog house with heating pads for the winter and air conditioning for the summer.

“Everybody just loves this dog. People who can’t afford a dog bring their kids here to play with Blue. … He is the only dog I know who got four plates of Thanksgiving dinner at his dog house,” she said.

Conner says she has collected more than 1,100 signatures in support of Blue, who is on Facebook as Bluedog EB-Mascot.

“He was here before we became a city” she said, “so all we are asking for is for the city to grandfather him in as a representative of the community.”

(Photo: From Blue’s Facebook page)

When Jim Berger was 12 years old he asked Frank Lloyd Wright to do for his dog what the architect did for his dad — design him a house.

The boy asked Wright, in a 1956 letter, to design a house for his dog, Eddie, that ”would go with our house” — it too being a Frank Lloyd Wright design that his father spent 20 years building in San Anselmo, Calif.

Wright, in keeping with his cantankerous image, wrote back that he was “too busy,” but suggested the boy write him again next year.

Berger wrote back the next November, and this time Wright responded with a full set of working drawings for a triangular-shaped, four-square-foot dog house, to be built of the mahogany and cedar scraps left over from the main house.

According to Architects and Artisans, young Berger didn’t build the house. But, after he joined the army, his father and brother did, completing it in 1963.  After his father died in 1973, Jim’s mother would dispose of it, dropping it off at the dump.

“Frankly, it’s the best story ever about Wright,” says Michael Miner, who’s taking a reconstructed version of the original dog house on a coast-to-coast tour to promote “Romanza,” his film on Wright’s work in California.

“People think he was this curmudgeonly old architect, but here he was, breaking down and doing something wonderful for a 12-year-old.”

Miner asked Jim Berger and his brother Eric to build the reconstructed version in 2010 — and they agreed. (Miner filmed the constuction process, and included it in “Romanza.”)

Miner says the original dog house never got much use — not by Eddie, or subsequent dogs in the Berger family. Eddie, he says, “didn’t like it – he liked to sleep by the warmth coming out of the front door.”

Gotta love Dundalk.

It’s Baltimore at its blue collar, unpretentious best, and it’s where, as our wandering continues, we’ve hung our hat (and leash) for the past three days as we attempt to figure out what to do next.

Once again, we were in the home of an ex (no bridge-burner me) — a modest little house on a traffic circle, across the street from the Dog House, a  to-go restaurant painted highway stripe yellow that serves up hot dogs, burgers and greasy breakfast sandwiches that I eat on the front porch as Ace and his better-than-ever friend Fanny frolic in the front yard.

We sleep on the couch, wake up to the best kind of coffee (already made), take daily walks down to Bear Creek and spend most of the time on the front porch, writing.

Ace and Fanny alternately wrestle and rest in the shade, and Fanny always leaps up and runs along the fence when a motorcycle, boat on a trailer, or skateboarder passes by — those apparently being among her triggers.

We’ve gotten to know Brutus, a six-month old, but already huge, chocolate lab next door who likes to jump on (but not over, yet) the chain link fence, dangling his paws over the top rail and leaning as if to say, “C’mon over, let’s talk for a while.”

We’ve watched as the school buses roll by, and fresh-faced students head to bus stops, falling into the routine of another school year. One paused at the fence — a Mountain Dew in one hand, an open and half eaten plastic bowl of microwaveable macaroni and cheese in the other, her requisite blue uniform shirt open to display more cleavage than I would think her school would deem appropriate – and asked me for a cigarette.

“Fresh out,” I replied.

In Dundalk, people say what they mean, mean what they say, and wear what they want. If they’re feeling crabby, they show it (especially in the traffic circle), and if they’re feeling friendly, they show that, too.

Today, Ace and I bid farewell to Fanny and head back to the old ‘hood — South Baltimore, where I’ll stay again with my schoolteacher friends for a couple of days before heading to another friend’s home nearby for a few days more. She’s going to the beach, and her cat needs feeding. Even though her cat hissed at me the last time I fed it — and after I fed it, no less — I quickly volunteered for the job.

Our time in Dundalk has been peaceful, work-friendly and comfortable, but one shouldn’t overstay one’s welcome — especially with an ex, even if she is your dog’s number one fan and Godmother. For ex’s move on from the shared life and start their own and, painful as it might to no longer fit into it, that’s reality.

Like the signs say, one must yield to the traffic in the circle.

“Dog House” isn’t a book about a dog; it’s a book about a lifetime of them — about the love we seek, the missteps we take and, at last, making that perfect, or almost perfect, canine connection.

Carol Prisant, though she grew up in a less than pet-friendly home, was pretty sure she was a dog lover, but it took awhile for her to get it right.

With humans, on the other hand, she appears to have succeeded the first time, and her 42-year marriage to husband Millard is the other ongoing theme of her often hilarious, often poignant, but never syrupy memoir.

While the book is about love and loss and dogs — all subjects prone to sappy treatment — Prisant’s sense of humor, honesty and willingness to admit she may not have always been the perfect pet owner make for some fun and refreshing reading.

Prisant, when it comes to the pets in her life, starts at the beginning — with the goldfish that her pet-challenged mother flushed down the toilet, a stinky dime store turtle she subsequently released into the wild, a bird whose toes fell off after she brought it home from Woolworth’s and a monkey that fell in love with her husband’s leg.

Eventually she and her husband work their way up to dogs, including Cosi, a Jack Russell terrier, Fluffy, a purebred collie, and Blue and Billy and Emma and Jimmy Cagney and Juno — to name a few.

All of them had their idiosyncrasies. Some, she admits, were more than they could handle. Some moved on to new homes, and new ones would arrive — up to and after the death of her husband.

“Dog House” is more than a book about dogs, though. It’s about the love of a mother for her son, and, most of all, a wife for her husband.

Prisant is the American editor of the Condé Nast publication The World of Interiors, and author of “Good, Better, Best,” ”Antiques Roadshow Primer,” and “Antiques Roadshow Collectibles.”

(For more news and reviews of dog books, visit our “Good Dog Reads” page.)

All the talk about the yet to be selected, procured or named White House Dog has gotten me to thinking: Isn’t it time to start giving some consideration to the White Doghouse?

Turns out, Stephanie Rubin is way ahead of me. Rubin, a Los Angeles landscape designer, is owner of Sustainable Pet Design and inventor of the Greenrrroof Animal Home. And with a little help from her friends she’s already built and arranged delivery of “Summa Canum, The Obama Dog Home.”

Summa Canum (Latin for “Top Dog”) has been created “to provide an appropriately sustainable and stylish home for the new leader of the free canine world.”

At the same time, the project’s aimed at introducing eco-friendly practices and materials to the American people.

On the Sustainable Design website, Rubin says public interest in the Obama dog — not yet selected, though the First Family is reportedly leaning toward a Portugese water dog — inspired her to create a dog home as a gift for the Obama family.

“As we began construction on Summa Canum, one vendor after another expressed a desire to contribute. Summa Canum is now a gift from many. Materials donated include historic wood, greenroof plants, eco-friendly paint, bio-fuel, expert advice, as well as arrangement of transportation with a rock-n-roll legend.”

Summa Canum ins’t an exact replica of the White House. But it is modeled on Greek Revivial architecture that was popular during our nation’s early years.

It is made of wood from cedar trees that President Andrew Jackson planted along the driveway of his estate, The Hermitage. After a tornado felled these trees in 1998, EarthSource Forest Products reclaimed the wood for lumber and has donated the last of it to Summa Canum.

Like her other creations, Summa Canum will have a green roof, consisting of vegetation supplied by Emory Knoll Farms, a Maryland nursery. The dog home will arrive at The White House unplanted in order to provide the Obama kids with the opportunity to get their hands dirty in their own little garden.

Third Planet Energy has arranged for delivery of Summa Canum by Neil Young, a longtime champion of environmental causes, who will haul it with his biofuel-powered 1959 Lincoln. Amoeba Music provided financial support to offset the cost of the trip.

“Completely dog-mad.”

That’s how a publicist describes a wealthy accountant and his doctor wife who are spending a quarter of a million pounds — just under $400,000 — on a house for their two Great Danes.

The doggie domicile will feature a 52-inch plasma TV; a retina-scan entry system that will allow the Danes, but no other dogs, entry; two bedrooms and a separate lounging area; two elevated temperature-controlled beds lined with sheepskin, from which the dogs can see out through the giant windows; automatic dispensers of food and chilled, filtered water; a temperature-controlled pool/spa; and an outdoor adventure play area — all of which can be controlled and viewed by the owners via computer from anywhere in the world.

The 1,000-square-foot kennel will adjjoin the main house, both of which are being built on the exclusive Lower Mill Estate near Cirencester, Gloucestershire, according to the London Daily Mail. 

Work is due to start next April and take around 18 months. The owners have requested anonymity. 

“All we can say is that they are a retired couple who are completely dog-mad,” a publicist said. “They said: ‘We want the perfect living space for us and our dogs’ and that’s what they are getting.”

(Illustration by London Daily Mail)