Gomphothere's Zoo Design Thread

My real job, LOL, and then the holidays intervened for a while. Am back to work on Temperate South America. It is a bit bigger project than the others: (1) an aquarium with 15 marine ecoregions plus two dozen sea/shore bird species and the Marine Otter; (2) terrestrial exhibits that involve 7 wide ranging (across multiple ecoregions) birds of prey and 4 wide ranging mammalian predators; and (3) eight terrestrial ecoregions, with approximately two dozen different habitats, displaying about 475 additional species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. It's not quite as huge as it sounds, since over 100 of those species are Passerine birds, about another 100 are small lizards endemic to the area, most a group known as Liolaemids, often called "tree iguanas" in English (but that's a misleading name), almost 60 are rodents (most small, such as mice, rats and tuco-tucos, but a few large), and about 50 are species of frogs and toads. It's been a challenge finding out the information I'd like to have for each species to design appropriate exhibits since I can't read Spanish and many of the lizard and rodent species have very little information about them available in English beyond their name and a brief description of their physical appearance and habitat.

 

Very happy to hear that you're back Gompothere. Can't wait for your next project.

 

I really think that, once you're done with this amazing conceptual design, you should get in touch with the guy who runs IdealBuildout.com to have a map put together.

Love everything about this project, and I really hope to see more in the future. Stunning work.

 

Thanks.

I wish I had the skills to do this stuff on a computer. I downloaded sketchup and started trying to learn it using the tutorials on youtube, but quickly got very, very frustrated with the slow progress and somewhat un-intuitive nature of CAD, and gave up. One challenge is that zoo design needs both standard architecture and landscape architecture and, other than sketchup, which is not very fancy in its output, the other programs that might work are way too expensive to indulge in for a spare time hobby.

One of my pet projects if I win the lottery is to hire some wiz kid to use CAD to convert my work, LOL.

 

How is it coming along?

 

Cooome baaaaack!!!!

 

Gompothere, do you intend to continue

 

Any progress? It was going absolutely fantastically

 

So, yes, after a four year hiatus, I am back at it. It's a long story. Part of it was that, in working on Temperate South America, what I learned about the plight of frogs there was really depressing. (You'll see once I start posting the exhibits that include the amphibians. The number of vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered and quite possibly extinct species leaves you grief stricken for what's been lost or might be soon, even more so if you extrapolate it to the rest of the world.) Once I got my motivation back, I realized some of the shortcomings in the work I had already done, so I went back and improved on that. Also, Temperate South America posed some serious challenges for zoo design. There are, literally, hundreds of species of lizards native to the area for which finding habitat and breeding information, not to mention determining current taxonomic status, is time consuming. Along the way, my own personal life--a health crisis (all good, at least for now) --and my day job interfered with getting back to this work for long stretches.

In any event, today I begin Mondays with Gomphothere and have enough postings for about twelve weeks. I am starting with a much elaborated on basic concept and master plan for the zoo. There is a prose description of the concept, a color-coded Mollweide projection to show how the concept is based, a master plan for the zoo with key numbers using the same color code, and some detail behind a few of those key numbers that wouldn't fit on the master plan page. Hope this provides some fun for some of you.

 

I am so happy to see you back, Gomphothere. I can’t wait to see what you have been working on!

 

Just realized I left off the Mollweide projection so you can compare it to the Master Plan. Now attached.

 

Today's post covers Visitor Services. As I began working on different parts of the zoo, I wanted them to fit together, and I needed more detail for things such as the entrance complexes, which were part of the first three exhibit areas I designed (and had just been black blobs on my drawings), and the zoo's transportation, especially the automatic people mover ("APM"), which also consistently appeared in the sections on which I worked, so I spent some time designing them while also specifying more about how the zoo would work for visitors.

Attachments are: A description of Visitor Services (you'll want to refer back to last week's Master Plan to see where places such as the parking lots and entrance complexes are located); Entrance Complex floor plan and key; three drawings of various parts of the APM; and a drawing showing various kinds of walkways. This time around I've integrated the numbered keys with the prose description, so the numbers in parentheses in the Visitor Services description correspond with the numbers on the Entrance Complex floor plan and key.

I'll attach the APM and Concourse drawings to a second email. Am not sure if there's a limit to the total size of attachments.

 

Rest of the attachments.

 

So here is a drastically enlarged and color coded Organization Chart (uploaded in two parts because of the limit), along with explanatory commentary. Find the job that you would want!

 

Just a random question, will you be returning to posting exhibit descriptions like you used to in this thread?

 

Yes. Revised Arctic, Antarctic and Galapagos exhibits coming, followed by a multi-exhibit Temperate South America complex. Also now revising the Nearctic Tundra exhibit and beginning work on the Palearctic Tundra.

 

Really excited for this. So much detail in the visitor ammeneties section; I will give my full thoughts tomorrow.

 

So here is a revised Arctic Holarctic Exhibit Area. Compared to the first one, I redid all the drawings except the cross-sections with a new color scheme (got a bigger set of colored pencils) and figured out how to do typed numbering instead of hand numbering and added the key numbers to the Visitor Experience, which should make things much easier to correlate. For the exterior, I added the Entrance Complex and APM that I designed and posted just recently. I also added a salt water filtration and chilling plant and more detail on the Beluga Whale service and holding area. The interior is now all on one drawing instead of split between two and there's a bit more detail. I did more intense research into distribution/ranges, and added several species of birds (Barnacle Goose, Greater Scaup, Red-breasted Merganser, Harlequin and Long-tailed Ducks, Atlantic Puffin, Baird's and Purple Sandpipers, Black-legged Kittiwake, Common Ringed Plover, and the Common and Hoary Redpolls), along with the Northern Red-backed Vole. Inuit and Norwegian names have been added to the Key, and the IUCN status (unless least concern) has been added throughout. Finally, I found additional sources of usable pics (i.e., no copyright infringement) for the Visitor Experience and they've been improved. I'm going to try to keep track of the animal census as I go along, and for this one: Census of higher vertebrates, excluding fish and invertebrates: Mammals 9/42; Birds 44/234; Total: 53 species/276 specimens. This also introduces a color scheme for the keys: brown for mammals, light blue for birds, red for reptiles, green for amphibians, blue for fish and marine invertebrates, and gray for terrestrial invertebrates.

 

More attachments: Key; Master Plan showing location; exterior; interior; lower level;

 

Final batch: Cross-sections. Am having technical difficulties getting the Visitor Experience posted. Will get it up as soon as I can.