Ace Torre
Cashio, Cochran, Torre/Design Consortium, Ltd.
New Orleans, Louisiana

In general, the historical perspective of zoos has been geared solely toward the display of animals. One of the major problems most zoos, large and small, encountered was that the circulation, viewing opportunities and visitor services were pathetic. As a result, not very many facilities were able to attain their maximum success in terms of being supported by their community and attended by the community.

Many zoos now are becoming self-sufficient, which is a big issue in zoo design. As an example, municipalities provide people with a lot of recreational amenities, such as ballfields, which are not self-sufficient and are paid for by tax dollars because there is no way they could pay their own way. A zoological facility, on the other hand, properly designed and managed, can give recreation, education, be involved in conservation and research and not cost taxpayers a penny. It’s all predicated on giving people the maximum experience, something that reiterates the moral issue of zoos and where the zoo stands on global development and infringement on habitats and so forth, and at the same time making it flat out fun.

One figure that the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (AAZPA) loves to quote, and we do as well, is that more people attend zoos each year than all professional sports combined. That’s no small amount of people. More than 200 million. When you look at it all, it’s an amazing thing that has only in the last few years come to fruition on its own, by taking what was the typical zoo and organizing it in one of several ways, such as zoogeographic, bioclimatic, biologic, or taxonomical.

What we try to do in our zoo design is create a facility that has one major entry, controlled hierarchy of access, effective concessioning and cost-effective management of zoo personnel. We generally go through an entry area in three phases: an entrance plaza, an arrival zone and an orientation area, all with specific functions. The entrance allows for massive queuing and effective loading and unloading on peak days, the arrival area is where you ticket, rent strollers, find out about special events, and there are food services and places to buy film. It also works the same on the way out, because the typical zoo goer isn’t going to buy a stuffed bear for a child and carry it around all day; they’re going to buy it on the way out of the zoo. The orientation area communicates the given theme of the exhibits and the facility itself, and delineates the various paths that take visitors through the park.

We try to take that entrance area and theme it uniquely to the particular city. For example, in Memphis, Tennessee, we’re doing a recreation of the Temple of Memphis, linking the Memphis of antiquity to modern day Memphis. Visitors go through the avenue of the animals, through the portals to the orientation plaza, which has as its core the Nile exhibit, which delineates the seven cataracts and the development of Egypt over 2000 years. The backdrop to that is the African lion, which is part of their big cat exhibit. Another example is El Paso, Texas, where visitors go through a Pueblo. We theme it and try to work it to the point where it has a solution that’s very specific to that city and its culture and history, and is an identifiable item as such.

Jorge Maura
Park Maintenance Supervisor
Metro Zoo
Miami, Florida

Because we are a municipal zoo, the bureaucracy of local government is such that we rarely get to actually work with Landscape Architects. By the time the city planners and other groups get finished, the Landscape Architects have finished their designs without getting a chance to get any input from our maintenance department. What happens is that we sort of inherit their work after the fact, rather than participating in the design phase as we would like to.

Grant Jones
Jones and Jones
Seattle, Washington

David Rice
Chief Architect
San Diego Zoo
San Diego, California

The last couple of years we’ve gotten a few things done, the Kopje Exhibit, Tiger River and the latest is our Sun Bear Forest. We ran into some problems with the Sun Bear exhibit. The exhibit was designed for two or three mature bears, but they released five young bears into it instead, and they’ve really worked over the landscape and some of the other features in it. Part of the reason behind that is because, although the San Diego Zoo is on city land, it isn’t a city zoo. As an institution, it definitely belongs to the people of San Diego, but it lives and dies by attendance and its ability to generate income. We build our exhibits for altruistic reasons, to give the animals a better home, help propagate the species and give the public an opportunity to view these animals and learn why the environment and the animals are important. But because the zoo has to generate income to stay open, we don’t always have as much time as we’d like to work on an exhibit. In the Sun Bear case, the summer season was approaching and we couldn’t wait as long as we’d like to establish the plantings. But they are slowly coming around with careful maintenance.

Its always interesting, however, to see the animals released into an exhibit. Part of the Sun Bear exhibit includes some Lion-tailed Macaques, a primate that is on the endangered species list. We had been working with a behaviorist who had been observing the Macaques for the last several years, matching up individual animals and establishing a breeding program, and when we turned the Macaques loose in the exhibit, they began displaying behavior that he had never seen, only read about. That was definitely a measure of success from our standpoint.