We go to the zoo to watch the animals, but we really see ourselves. Most of our time is spent talking with each other or people-watching. Only a fraction is devoted to observing roaring lions and monkeys swinging from branch to branch. If the zoo opens a window onto the animal world, it also holds up a mirror to the human world.
For centuries, the display of captive animals has served different man-made agendas, from advancing our understanding of nature to flaunting wealth and power. The lions chained to the king’s throne let everyone know who was boss. Of late, however, the zoo has been evolving into a whole new breed of cat–or mouse, as in Mickey.
As the theme park becomes one of America’s main forms of family entertainment and as the zoo competes for scarce leisure time, Disney’s Magic Kingdom is subtly but unmistakably affecting the way this age-old institution presents the animal kingdom.
Forget those old-fashioned cages with bars or those snooze-inducing dioramas. Think pizzazz. Think storyline. Think theater, complete with props and seductive stagecraft, like mist-making machines that simulate a tropical rain forest, but actually may make us feel as if we’re on the set of that foggy closing scene in “Casablanca.”
As time goes by, it’s natural to wonder, will theme-park artifice render zoos’ traditional teaching mission as extinct as the brontosaurus? Will the zoo of the future be more about glitz than gorillas?
Well, hold the mouse ears.
Two new buildings in the Chicago area–the $12 million Regenstein Small Mammal-Reptile House at Lincoln Park Zoo, which portrays the environments of four continents, and the $10.5 million Living Coast at Brookfield Zoo, which depicts the coastal region of Chile and Peru–reassure that entertainment can peacefully coexist with education.
Drawing upon the latest trend in zoo design, both immerse us in the natural world, offering the illusion that we are confined and the animals are free–and the lesson that entire habitats must be preserved if endangered animals are to be saved.
What separates these buildings is the artfulness with which they teach that lesson and relate to their human habitat. With apologies to Charles Darwin, let’s call the matter of winnowing their merits a process of architectural selection. It’s one in which the Small Mammal-Reptile House emerges as the more advanced of the structural species.
By no means a great work of architecture, the city building still does far better than its suburban counterpart at adapting to and enhancing the built environment. Inside, it offers a sophisticated melding of graphics, interactive displays and exhibition design, yet it possesses an intimacy and excitement sure to appeal to children.
Credit is due not only to its designers, but to its principal patron, Joseph Regenstein Jr., whose foundation paid for half the building’s cost. In an age when corporate sponsorship has created such ludicrous titles as the Cheetos Cheetah Exhibit at the Ft. Worth Zoo, virtually turning animal displays into advertisements, it is refreshing to see patronage practiced the old-fashioned way–with dignity and public spirit.
The Chicago Park District and the Public Building Commission of Chicago also provided major funding, while the principal financial backers of The Living Coast were the Cook County Preserve District, the Chicago Zoological Society and its Women’s Board.
Located about 15 miles apart, the Lincoln Park and Brookfield Zoos tell the story of the American zoo in microcosm. They are as different as Chicago and its suburbs, but they also show how the design trends that shape our world respect no borders.
The directors of both zoos–Kevin Bell at Lincoln Park and George Rabb at Brookfield–acknowledge that the popularity of theme parks has affected what they do, but they maintain that entertainment and education ultimately are complementary. “We’re very competitive for leisure time,” Rabb says. “So we adapt and adopt and invent ourselves.”
Founded in 1868, with a gift of two swans from New York’s Central Park, Lincoln Park Zoo is compact, walkable and easily accessible by public transportation. Most of its animals are grouped in a traditional manner, by type, though they are now displayed in natural settings rather than in cages with bars. Ranging from Prairie School to postmodern, the zoo’s brown-brick and concrete buildings are set in a romantic Victorian landscape punctuated by picturesque lagoons. The typical zoogoer stays for a couple of hours at a time, usually as part of a visit to the lakefront. Best of all, admission is free.
Brookfield Zoo, by contrast, is a world unto itself, a day trip, a place so big that trams take its paying customers around. (Admission for adults is $6 per person). Opened in 1934 in west suburban Brookfield, it melds a cross-shaped, Beaux-Arts plan with outdoor, barless exhibits that reflect the progressive influence of German zoo owner Karl Hagenbeck. Brookfield’s early architecture–especially the reddish-orange tile-roofed, neo-classical gatehouses at the zoo’s north and south ends–is graceful enough. But recent buildings, such as the vast brown steel shed known as Tropic World, possess all the grace of airplane hangars.
Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill of Chicago in the decade that the same architects completed the 110-story Sears Tower, which last year surrendered its title as the world’s tallest building, Tropic World was billed upon its 1982 debut as the world’s largest zoo exhibit building–in effect, a horizontal version of Sears’ vertical gigantism.
Functionally, at least, it was innovative, providing gorillas and monkeys with soaring spaces akin to their native habitat and mixing species that typically would exist together in the wild. But while its animals no longer lived in a vacuum, as they would have in the Victorian-era zoo, the building itself utterly ignored its surroundings, much as Sears did with its barren, street-level plaza. In that sense, The Living Coast and the Small Mammal-Reptile House could not be more different from the anti-urban Tropic World.
Nothing demonstrates this shift in sensibility more dramatically than the $1 million renovation of Lincoln Park Zoo’s waterfowl lagoon, a project carried out alongside the Regenstein building by Teng & Associates of Chicago. Once cluttered with overgrown plants and scraggly trees, the waterfowl lagoon has been handsomely remade, with new fieldstone at its edges and a mix of native prairie plants and ornamentals that eventually will resemble a nascent marsh.
But the most telling sign of change is a modern version of a romantic Victorian bridge Teng conceived of as a place for couples to get married. The spartan, functional approach to this span would have been to let its steel beams and railing go unadorned. But the architects wisely realized that part of this bridge’s function is to create a sense of place. So it has a purely decorative steel arch, as well as steel ornament bent into the shape of a reverse, abstracted “S,” evoking the swans given to the zoo at its founding. The result is as lyrically graceful as the new swans that glide across the lagoon.
The Small Mammal-Reptile House is equally at ease with its surroundings. Primarily shaped by zoo specialists CLR Design of Philadelphia, with help from Teng and the zoo staff, it is essentially a big building broken down to a human scale. Tweedy brown brick and delightful touches like column capitals sculpted in the shape of animals enable it to pay homage to such nearby masterpieces as the beautifully detailed Lion House. A ledge wrapped around the building’s base offers a place to sit and watch the swans.
This is an appropriate exercise in architectural modesty, a backdrop for the public space. Yet the building has faults. The repeated use of precast concrete panels showing the two featured animals, the fennec fox and a reptile called the day gecko, smacks of theme park cutesiness; the animals are treated as if they were logos, like Mickey and Donald, rather than straightforward symbols of the variety of creatures inside.
Worse, a glass dome, meant to echo the Lincoln Park Conservatory, sits like a lid atop the building’s masonry base. It’s an awkward meeting of 19th and 20th Century technologies–a sign that, though this building is in harmony with its surroundings, it is not entirely in tune with itself.
On the whole, however, the Small Mammal-Reptile House is a plus. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of The Living Coast, which was designed by the San Francisco firm of Esherick Homsey Dodge and Davis with the zoo’s staff and other consultants. The job was complicated by the simultaneous addition of an adjacent, $4 million restaurant-gift shop with a South American theme, by the Aria Group Architects of Oak Park, who have worked for theme restaurant maven Richard Melman.
Much as the Regenstein building has perked up Lincoln Park Zoo’s western edge, The Living Coast is meant to enliven a formerly dead zone in Brookfield’s southwest corner. At that urban design task, at least, it succeeds. A semicircular plaza, framed by the facades of The Living Coast and the restaurant-gift shop, provides a festive place for people-watching.
Yet the plaza doesn’t harmonize with the zoo’s neo-classical architecture, despite such devices as a quarter-circle of precast concrete columns that projects outward from The Living Coast. The most obvious shortcomings are two-dimensional, metal symbols of animals that have been tacked onto the mosaic tile of the colonnade; it would have been far more graceful to integrate them into the architecture, as was done at the Small Mammal-Reptile House. Another problem is that the otherwise well-executed restaurant-gift shop almost overshadows The Living Coast. Instead, this commercial building should have deferred to its institutional neighbor.
Ultimately, though, The Living Coast is done in by its own visual mish-mash and second-rate materials, such as a synthetic stucco that fails to convey the sense of permanence associated with the classical tradition. Three curving drums that dominate the exterior recall the corkscrewing rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, but they lack the master’s extraordinary detailing, and the geometric purity of the drum above the entrance is ruined by more animal symbols and a scratchy gray-blue line that appears to represent a coast. Bright blue details, which gaudily express the sea theme, cinch the impression that this building has parachuted in from the Pacific Rim.
The interiors of the two buildings reflect the current trend of telling a story that underscores the significance of preserving entire habitats as well as endangered species. Both take the visitor along darkened, meandering paths that lead to climactic skylit spaces, roughly 40 feet high. Both use an array of new technology to simulate natural environments. Both use graphic design and playful text in an attempt initiate discussion among the people seeing the exhibits. Whether their acoustics will effectively muffle the noise created by busloads of schoolchildren will only be revealed with time.
A major difference is that CLR Design thoughtfully arranged the interior of the Small-Mammal Reptile House so that it begins with “gem-box” dioramas that are in sync with Lincoln Park Zoo’s grouping of animals by type. The exhibits then build to groupings of mammals and reptiles and finally to a domed ecosystem that portrays environments in Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. Throughout, the displays are handsome stage sets that correctly allow the animals–such as the furry koala bear or the green-tree python wrapped like a garden hose–to remain the focus of attention.
The Living Coast’s interior–in which visitors descend winding paths to exhibits that depict the open ocean, then ascend to displays of near-shore waters and the rocky South American coast–suffers from some of the same design problems that afflict its exterior. Yet it is rescued by the clarity of its graphics, the pacing of its exhibits and such stunningly innovative displays as a 50,000-gallon exhibit of an underwater forest formed by artificial kelp and rock formations, as well as lifelike reproductions of tiny marine animals like sea stars. An exhibit of jellyfish, their white forms magically lit against a blue background, recalls a surrealist painting.
So worry not. Mickey Mouse hasn’t taken over zoo architecture in the Chicago area–not yet, anyway. At both Lincoln Park and Brookfield Zoos, the artifice of the theme park has been harnessed to teach us about the interconnectedness of life on Earth. We’ve made great strides at portraying the crucial relationship between the well-being of animals and the quality of the natural environment. Now, if we only can apply the same lesson to the art of building our own habitat.
