Monday, May 23, 2016

Going Ape: new zoo architecture | Architonic

Zoos that present caged animals like museum exhibits fell out of favour long ago. Today, animals are kept in “landscapes” that are tailored to their particular needs and intended to whisk the visitor off to exotic worlds. One of the first zoos with such an artificial landscape was the zoological park in Paris-Vincennes, built in 1934. In its redesign by Bernard Tschumi Architects, which updates the original concept, the animals are set in their “natural” habitats of Europe, Madagascar, and Guyana, as well as in open expanses modelled on the Sudanese Sahelian zone and Patagonian plateau. The result is an illusion of vast wilderness in which the visitor is invited to embark on an expedition of discovery. It was the German animal trader and zoo director Carl Hagenbeck who, in the early twentieth century, revolutionized zoo design. For his zoo outside of Hamburg, he had planners lay out naturalistic open-air enclosures for the animals that were surrounded by water basins and vegetation rat



from New stories by Architonic http://ift.tt/1NIt9Mu

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