In the not-to distant past of zoo design, the method of choice for animal display was passive observation. Unfortunately, this created a sterile viewing environment where animals were kept in cages and zoo goers paraded down aisles, peering through thick bars to look at bored specimens of the world’s exotic beasts.

Designing a zoo’s public space means the realization that exotic plantings may not be appreciated by some attendees, and often are trampled or damaged as people seek “natural” shortcuts through a park. “Maintaining a traffic area becomes a full-time job,” according to Gary Lyons, a senior gardener at the Los Angeles Zoo. “Part of it has to do with the number of people going through the park. We have almost two million people a year through here.” Many of those visitors are children who don’t know any better than to take shortcuts or pull on plants.

This creates a dilemma for Landscape Architects, zoo directors and maintenance crews. “A zoo should have outstanding specimen plants, and deal as much as possible in unusual plants,” says Thomas. Unfortunately, individual plants may not last long. In order to keep as much exotic growth on the grounds as possible, the Los Angeles Zoo has a working relationship with the Huntington Gardens, botanical garden located in Pasadena, California, and also receives several donations from personal collections. “We had four beautiful Bocarnias bequeathed to us that were planted in 1913 in front of an apartment building in Los Angeles,” explains Thomas. “When the owner died, he wanted the zoo to have them, but they sat there for several years simply because moving them would have been a major undertaking. I drove by the apartment building one day and discovered that the trees were being vandalized, so we started work on getting them moved so they could be saved. We eventually got the city to go down there with a 20-ton crane and move them up to the zoo.”

The solution to keeping a zoo’s public space area intact could be education. The impact of visitor immersion on learning is an exciting one. Learning becomes an adventure as people participate within a world totally removed from their own.

At the Los Angeles Zoo’s new Adventure Island, the habitats of the Southwestern United States is recreated for the Zoo’s young visitors, exhibiting selected animals from the seashore, cave, desert, meadow and mountain areas, complete with interactive video and audio presentations explaining why the areas are important and what they offer. Integrated into the exhibit are an animal nursery, turn-of-the-century Spanish hacienda and a Mexican food stand.

The St. Louis Zoo is also committed to furthering the education of its attendees while maintaining the integrity of its bioclimatic exhibits. The newly opened Living World Educational Center, located in the Zoo’s new Wetterau Pavillion, combines high technology with live animals in natural environments to give insight on animal diversity, ecology and conservation. The exhibits within the hall are rich with computers and videos which amplify, explain and entertain.

Above the stream, visitors can watch videos of larger predatory or nocturnal animals. Along the water’s edge, they can look through microscopes at the stream’s tiny inhabitants. Computers will show how change affects the lives of the creatures in the living stream. In addition, projection microscopes light up the hall’s walls with three-dimensional pictures of the smallest creatures that live in the stream.

Educating visitors has a positive impact on reducing damage, and vandalism seldom is a problem in zoos. Other factors, such as poor planning, however, can create problems in maintaining public spaces. “Our monorail tickets used to be stick-on, then we started finding them stuck to the pavement, garbage cans, tables and in bathrooms,” says Jorge Maura, park maintenance supervisor for the Metro Zoo in Miami, Florida. “So there are other factors that have to be thought about when considering the maintenance aspect of any design.”

Aeration is a popular water management tool used in both public space and animal exhibits. Aeration helps control algae, aquatic weeds, unpleasant odors and sludge build-up. Aeration reduces and often eliminates the need for chemicals. Some of the country’s most prestigious zoos, such as Cincinnati, Baton Rouge, San Antonio and the San Diego Zoo use them. Aeration is popular because it stimulates natural clean-up processes by introducing oxygen into the water, which allows aerobic bacteria to respire and efficiently decompose biological wastes. Surface aeration brings cold, dense water to the surface, forcing warm water to the bottom. This induced circulation, together with the wave action created by the spray, breaks up stagnation, effectively changing the environment in which algae does not thrive.

With the trend toward naturalized animal environments, the zoo of the future may place the people in protected areas and allow the animals to roam free around them. Until that time, Landscape Architects will continue to wrestle with the arduous task of creating realistic representations of far-off habitats that can stand up to the punishment of the modern world.