by MATTHEW WOODLEY

Inside the Darling Foundry, a handful of people stand back and take in Brian Jungen's carefully ordered pile of blocks. A black-and-white longhair sniffs her way around her new home, stops and scratches. Somebody sneezes.

Of the near three million cats in Quebec, eight have just moved into a small-scale impression of Habitat '67, architect Moshe Safdie's socialist housing dream, a complex that would fit lots of people into an interesting, economical space and give them each a garden. It was an experiment gone awry; costs flew through the cultivated roofs and Habitat '67 now sits as very cool looking, exorbitantly priced condos in what might as well be the middle of nowhere.

They might not know it because of their relatively small brains, but these are lucky cats. An art star has built them a utopian city of blocks wrapped in carpet with cute little round rugs inside. On a steady feed of Science Diet and under constant care of SPCA volunteers, they'll hang out in Jungen's cubist playhouse until somebody adopts them. For every kitty who finds a new home, one more from the SPCA gets a new lease in Habitat/04, keeping the occupancy at eight, a "manageable" number in the mind of SPCA kingpin Pierre Barnotti, who paces around the giant installation.

The clever meeting of two worlds is typical Jungen, who has become famous for his almost absurdist, art-meets-activism installations over the past few years. "I wanted to do something site-specific to Montreal," he says. "I've always really liked Safdie's Habitat, and wanted to draw parallels between his original concept as ideal mass housing and use a contemporary, underprivileged situation. I wanted to salvage his idea."

Drawing parallels between two different things is what has made Jungen the busy, internationally known artist he is. In his well-known 1999 piece, Prototypes for a New Understanding, the half-Dene-zaa (First Nations), half-Swiss artist, who grew up in rural B.C., made traditional Northwest Coast masks out of cut-up Nike sneakers. In Shapeshifter (2000) he made a giant whale skeleton out of plastic lawn chairs. In Beer Cooler, he carved traditional aboriginal images into a polystyrene cooler, filled it with cans of Bud and presented it in Edinburgh, Scotland, a way of giving alcohol back to the Europeans. Lately he's strayed from First Nations politics, last month building a half-sized basketball court out of 231 sweatshop tables in Harlem.

Habitat/04 is as equally effective a hybrid. Putting abandoned cats in a symbol of affluence makes a clean point about privilege. And cats are fun to watch. Hell, had I not been one of the sneezers I might have left with one of the little things myself.

Habitat /04: Cats Radiant City is at the Darling Foundry (745 Ottawa) until May 9