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Chester Zoo has debuted its new £40m ($62m, €56m) Islands development, a themed Indonesian adventure


connection and give them memories they’ll never forget. We want to wow them. As for the animals, they need as much space and as much behavioural enrichment as possible. In China, I recently saw a new polar bear enclosure which was purely artificial rock. Polar bears need to dig and they need earth to do that. We need to provide properly for the animal otherwise the work we do is not sustainable. We need to provide above and beyond what they would need in their natural environment. For example, when we did a wolf enclosure for the Yukon Bay project, it was made to look like windswept, wild Alaska.


How important are materials and plant life? How accurately do you try to create a specific ecosystem? At Chester, the visitor moves from one island group to the next, always across water, and every area has its own plant life, animals, decoration and architecture to create that authentic background. We chose plants that imitate the effect of Indonesian plants to create the right atmosphere. With materials, we’re sticklers for research. When we worked on the Zambezi attraction at Hannover Adventure Zoo, an artificial river recreating the African


©CYBERTREK 2015 AM 3 2015


“You have to tell the


story intuitively. Scenes are set up more like


dramaturgy than a story”


savannah, I’d travelled in Africa looking for authentic materials and decoration elements, but also observing how locals deal with detailing. In that project, for example, you’ll see signposts held up by bicycle chains. Visitors learn from the habitat we create. It’s telling stories through building layers.


How important is the “experience” – creating a story, or journey - to you? A story sets up a framework which makes it easy to explain why things are the way they are. In Islands at Chester Zoo, the story is simple: we take the visitor on a conservation expedition. You have to tell the story intuitively. We set up scenes so it’s more like dramaturgy


than it is a story. We set up a dramaturgical walk – a line through the space which we can make get bright, get narrow, get dark. It can be loud, it can be quiet. This gives us variants and means of expression. I can choose a point where it becomes emotional or dark or isolated. I can choose the moment where the story starts to develop or becomes more poignant. We have an iceberg principle, which means we want everybody to at least understand the tip of the iceberg. Visitors can then dive deeper if they want to.


What do you imagine will be happening in 20 years? Old-fashioned zoos will become more immersive. Zoos that can’t keep up with regulations will close. Other zoos will become more attractive. When a smaller and bigger zoo are nearby, they might combine to become less competitive. Some will reduce their collection to create more space. Some zoos will maintain the idea of building big dome architecture, but I think things will be driven by the future of the climate crisis. If climate, costs and the energy crisis continue to increase, it will have an effect on the type of architecture that future zoos can afford.


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