Hasta La Ideas

Paris landscape designers TN Plus and architects Beckmann N’Thépe have won a competition to design a zoological park on a series of artificial islands for the outskirts of St Petersburg.

Spread across 300 hectares, the park will replace the historic but cramped city-centre zoo.

The site will be arranged to loosely reflect the layout of the Earth’s continents when they first began to separate.

Different species of animals will be located in their native zones within this diagram.

Construction is scheduled for completion in 2014.

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More stories about zoos on Dezeen »

The following information is from the architects:

New Saint Petersburg Zoo
Primorskiy’s Zoological Parc

Landscape designers: TN Plus / Architects: Beckmann N’Thépe

Bruno Tanant et Jean Christophe Nani – Landscape designers TN Plus, Aldric Beckmann et Françoise N’Thépé – Architects Beckmann N’Thépé, win the international compétition for the completion of the Primorskiy’s new zoological Park, Saint-Petersburg (Russia).

Founded in 1865 Saint-Petersburg zoo is the oldest zoological park of Russia. As most of other parks across Russia, it suffers today from a cruel lack of space, being located in the heart of the historical town center. The city has hence decided to create a new zoo, which will range over 300 hectares, on the town’s outskirts, escaping this way the high population density of the urban area. The project preserves a large strech of land, and implements an environmentally beneficial approach.

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Concept

Thousands and thousands of years ago, the surface of the earth was but one and only supercontinent, known as the Pangea. Subject to tectonic forces, the Paleolithic Pangea over time broke into splinters, which slowly organised themselves in a configuration that, although always prone to movements, we still are familiar with. Ecosystems, once linked with each others, are today kept apart by oceans and seas. Species of the same origin have followed a distinct path on each separated continent.

The project offers a symbolic sample of every continent in an attempt to recreate the illusion of a reunited Pangea within the very zoological park of Saint-Petersburg. The archipelago therefore created will be made of islands representing South East Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, North America and Eurasia, the two latter being linked with each other by the pack ice of the Arctic Pole. The chosen site enjoys a profuse water supply, and hence is particularly fitted for such an insular organization of the various environments.

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Project

Nowadays the environment requirements and the green consciousness of the public are increasingly considered a core issue. The very background of a zoological park itself induces a mandatory respect of those values. Harshly criticized for a long time, zoological parks are today considered major stakeholders of biodiversty preservation. Even though it is an artificially recreated leisure area, the Primorskiy Park is above all an educational tool allowing each and everyone of us to better grasp our own history, and also a research center helping to preserve our Earth. So much goals were aimed both by architects and landscape designers of this project who managed to convince and share their ambitions.

Zoological Park of Saint-Petersburg
Expected time of complétion: 2014
Surface : 96 ha on a total area of 300 ha
3474 animals ( 479 species)

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Korkeasaari Zoo by TN+ and Beckmann-N’Thépé	Aviary by Group8 with Guscetti & Tournier	Elephant House by Foster + Partners

Staying in the UK for a bit longer after that last post, the Royal Institute of British Architects is continuing to clean some egg of its face this week after an incident that happened to drag Zaha Hadid‘s name into it, something we’re sure the architect is not at all pleased about. Building Design reports that the RIBA hosted a lecture last week by a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. You may have heard about the group before if you read architecture news at all, or happen to receive press releases about their work as we inexplicably do. Essentially, it’s a “9/11 was an inside job” group, led by American architect Richard Gage, who believes the World Trade Center towers could not have been felled by two mere airliners and therefore clearly the whole thing must have been set up by some vast, smoke filled room government conspiracy. BD reports that Gage and his companions were invited to talk about all of this at the RIBA by Craig Phillip Kiner, “an associate at Zaha Hadid Architects,” who later said his involvement with the group was “a personal matter” and was in no way related to Hadid. But now that the news is out and the RIBA is struggling to distance itself from hosting the event, we’re wondering how long Kiner will continue to be associated with his employer. According to BD’s report, roughly 230 people attended the event, wherein Gage, who makes a point to include that he is a member of the American Institute of Architects, much to their reported chagrin, asked in his speech:

Architects and engineers have willfully ignored the message that we’ve been speaking about for five years. When is the RIBA going to take this seriously?

If you’d like to spend the rest of the day on this subject, we recommend you Google “9/11 RIBA” and enjoy reading the rancor from both sides.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Mark Nixon of London studio CZWG has turned a bridge in Aarhus, Denmark, into a musical instrument by hanging metal pipes from the underside.

Varying in length, the 600 gold-anodized aluminium pipes move freely in the breeze, sounding like a traditional wind chime when they collide.

People on the bridge can touch interactive nodes on its surface to activate the chimes in a controlled order, playing the instrument.

Named Chimecco, the sculpture forms part of this year’s Sculpture by the Sea exhibition, which takes place entirely outdoors.

More projects in Denmark on Dezeen »

Here is some more information from Nixon:

Chimecco, an interactive instrument

Sculpture by the Sea, Aarhus Denmark

Mark Nixon’s kinetic sculpture ‘Chimecco’ has been realised as part of the exhibition ‘Sculpture by the Sea’ in Aarhus, Denmark: one of the most popular outdoor sculpture exhibitions in the world – which last year drew crowds of over 500,000 people.

Mark’s design for a large interactive wind chime was selected as one of the winners of an open competition from over 350 submissions.

Mark has spent the last month in Aarhus helping to construct the piece together with a team of assistants.

The piece is constructed from 600 50mm diameter gold anodized aluminium pipes ranging in length from 120 mm up to 3750mm.

These pipes are attached to the underside of a bridge and with a series of interactive nodes on the top surface that allow for people to “play” the instrument.

The design is based on three conceptual ideas.

• The idea of music and interaction as a catalyst for conversation and play.
• The non-visual object. The sculpture is ‘hidden’ beneath the bridge. A constant varying in wind conditions on the site mean that the sculpture will hide and reveal itself through the creation of sound when the wind choses to blow. Some days the sculpture will be discovered, creating a beautiful moment of realisation in the viewer, while other day the sculpture will remain still and may be completely passed by. The use of interactive nodes on the top creates another interesting effect. Due to the object being hidden while it is played a condition of performers and audience is created. The piece can be experienced in a number of different ways but never in its totality.
• Creation through the combined interactions of human movement and natural movement.

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Garden of 10,000 Bridges by West 8	Slightly Windy by José Ferrufino	Trees for Lycée Germaine Tillon by Matali Crasset

Architecture student Ben Kirk has designed conceptual towers to replace the fast-declining bee population by shooting artificial pollinators into the air.

Above: main pollinator release point in Kew Gardens

Located in Kew Gardens, a tower would fire spores covered in pollen-filled latex balloons into the air so the wind could transport them to parks across London.

Above: detail of artificial pollinators

City-wide recycling buildings would suck up unused pollen spores and redistribute them via a trumpet-like funnel.

Above: satellite pollinator release facility in Victoria Park

Additional off-the-shelf Garden Pollination Devices with acetate tentacles would also available for private gardens.

Above: satellite pollinator release facility in Victoria Park

Kirk developed the project while studying at the University of Westminster.

Above: garden pollination devices

More student projects on Dezeen »

Here are some more details from Kirk:

London Without Bees: architecture to pollinate a wilting city

What would happen if, as the worst predictions suggest, there were no bees in London? How would flowers be pollinated?

Above: detail of garden pollination devices

Here a headquarters in Kew Gardens releases millions of delicate floating inseminators, like artificial spores, across the city. Locally, in places like Victoria Park in Hackney, small repair and collection points work constantly to recycle the proxy bees: architecture to pollinate a wilting city.

Above: detail of garden pollination devices

Without the common honeybee, London’s gardens would be unrecognisable. We would miss their familiar buzz on a summers day, we would miss their delicious honey. Less obviously, we would miss their pollination, which allows plants to reproduce and flower in such vivid colours.

Above: prototypes of artificial pollinators

The honeybee’s form is no accident. She is a conspiracy of the pollen bearing plant world, her architecture so specific to the task.

Above: prototype of artificial pollinators

In response to the honeybee’s extinction, man must conceive a way to pollinate London’s parks and gardens, learning from her specficity through biomimicry.

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Firstly the ‘Garden Pollination Device’ fertilises London’s back gardens, shimmering like a garden chandelier as the light passes through the statically-charged perspex and acetate covered in pollen. It is designed as a flat pack product available off-the-shelf which the garden enthusiast can assemble themselves. It is suspended from the four corners of the typical London terrace back garden with tension wires, with the device hung in the middle, and predominantly relies on passive wind movement, and the vertical movement of the counter-weighted acetate tentacles, to accidentally brush past the anthers of one garden flower onto anothers stigma.

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Following this, a London-Wide Pollination Strategy is conceived, with delicate latex pollination devices projected into the London skies from a headquarters in Kew Gardens, and carried by the prevailing wind to the required destination.

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Once the pollination is complete, the proxy bees are recycled at local ‘Satellite Pollinator Release Facilities’ which strategically proliferate London.

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These ‘Release Facilities’ act both as workshops to recycle and reproduce the latex pollinators, and as a wind harvester, increasing the flow of air through the main funnel. This is achieved via side injection wind inlets and garden wind cowls, in order to project the proxy bees into the skies.

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Intentionally prosaic in external appearance, the facility in Victoria Park seamlessly merges into the urban fabric, its simple copper mesh cladding enveloping the workshop. Internally, the facility reveals a magical full height workshop with the spectacle of the ‘release’ seducing the visitor.

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Northern Europe Migrants Organisation	High Tide Street by James Gardener	Women at War by Charlotte Wilson