There is good news in zoos. Landscape Architects looking for new market opportunities may find them in substantial zoo construction and renovation projects planned in the years to come. The same can be said of aquariums.

For 1989, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (AAZPA) reported that accredited institutions added $408 million worth of capital improvements. In 1991, that figure increased to $449 million, according to Karen Allen, public affairs director of the AAZPA. "Zoos and aqua-riums are continually up-dating and renovating their facilities," she reports.

Moreover, Landscape Archi-tects have the opportunity to play a central and compelling role in zoo projects. "This is an area of design that takes full advantage of the Landscape Architect's expertise," says Daniel Kohl, manager of the Design Department of the Larson Co. in Tucson, Arizona.

Modern zoos emphasize natural systems - the inter-action of flora, fauna, water, geology and other natural phenomena. The Landscape Architect has unique qualifi-cations to handle many of those systems. "The require-ments for zoo design repre-sent a perfect marriage with the training that a Landscape Architect receives as a matter of course," Kohl says. The Larson Company currently has nine significant zoo and aquarium projects in the design process. Numerous others have been completed, including especially large pro-jects in Chattanooga, Omaha, Montreal and Osaka, Japan. Kohl believes the company's experience benefits Land-scape Architects interested in getting into the zoo field. Most zoo or aquarium projects are municipal. While the capital funding for new construction or renovation may sub-stantially come from private sources, in many cases the city government calls the shots.

Therefore, as in any bureau-cracy, the zoo usually has a rather formal procedure in-volving a request for proposal (RFP), as well as multiple layers of approval for each step of the design process, and many voices involved in budget ap-propriations through official councils, boards and commissions.

The Landscape Architect interested in a zoo project should always "look for design collaborations," Kohl advises. Especially for a project of moderate size, or larger, a local Landscape Architect might be the logical leader of a design team. Few local design pro-fessionals have a reputation as specialists in zoo projects. Most zoo directors and boards of directors and city councils tend to seek out a local professional who has teamed up with an ex-hibit specialist. Still, local folks like to work with local folks!

A well-established local Land-scape Architect, who teams with an exhibit specialist, will have a better chance of winning a zoo contract - assuming that they take the trouble to deal with municipal agencies and politicians in effective ways.

The zoo director plays a key role in the drama. Most directors adopt a "hands on" posture concerning everything about the project from its inception to completion. However, in other institutions the directors leave many of the details to department heads - even including the selection of design firms.

One way for the Landscape Architect to become known by the zoo director and staff would be to become involved in the local zoo society, volun-teer program or planning committees.

Zoo professionals hold to the premise that one of the primary functions of the zoo is to educate. The best format for education, in their view, is the placement of animals in a naturalistic environment, a habitat that looks as real as human ingenuity and tech-nology can provide.

The ideal exhibit places human visitors into the environment as unobtrusive observers among the habitats they want to ob-serve and study. Some zoo people speak of this as the "immersion concept." Hu-mans are meant to be im-mersed into the exhibits, in order to learn about and appreciate the animals and their native habitats.

These native habitats integrate the indigenous flora of a parti-cular animal's habitat with the animal's husbandry require-ments. Exhibit designers can help find that delicate balance for a successful exhibit. Local Landscape Architects attemp-ting to design a zoo exhibit alone can quickly run into problems.

For instance, a Landscape Architect recently specified oleanders for an exhibit, a poisonous plant to most animals. Another Landscape Architect designed a planting plan for a monkey exhibit, which called for large trees near the viewer. Indeed, the visitor can get a good view of the monkeys, but it also provides the primates with an excellent escape route!

When a zoo project follows the concept of immersion and naturalism in the exhibit designs successfully, the results can be spectacular. The truly successful zoo project has a Landscape Architect col-laborating with an exhibit designer and fabricator and achieves symbiosis. LASN