Denmark's cage-free zoo will put humans in captivity

[Judi Lynn]

Denmark's cage-free zoo will put humans in captivity

Bjarke Ingels’s ‘zootopia’ reverses the role of captor and captive to let animals roam free, while humans are hidden from view. But will it become a feral version of the Hunger Games?

Oliver Wainwright
theguardian.com, Tuesday 5 August 2014 05.50 EDT



He’s designed apartment blocks in the shape of mountains and a power station with a ski-slope on the roof. He’s made museums that erupt from the ground with cartoonish glee, and proposed a viewing tower like a gigantic spiralling lollipop. Now the Danish architectural wunderkind, Bjarke Ingels, has reinvented the zoo – by making humans the ones that are captive.

His plan for the Givskud “Zootopia”, a 1960s zoological park in southern Denmark, is a world where animals roam free, liberated from cages and tanks, while visitors observe them hidden from view, buried beneath the ground or obscured inside piles of logs. It is like a live Truman Show for animals, a 300-acre stage set wilderness in which the roaming beasts should never even know you are there, carefully concealed behind the scenes.

“Architects’ greatest and most important task is to … make sure that our cities offer a generous framework for different people – from different backgrounds, economy, gender, culture, education and age – so they can live together in harmony,” says the Bjarke Ingels Group, aka BIG. “Nowhere is this challenge more acrimonious than in a zoo.”

The architects propose to reduce the acrimony by banishing the human captors beneath the carpet – in some cases quite literally. Visitors will be able to observe lions from a bunker buried beneath a hill and peep at pandas through a bamboo screen. They will look at bears from a little house hidden in a stack of tree-trunks, and gawp at giraffes through holes cut into a hillside.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/aug/05/denmark-cage-free-zoo-will-put-humans-in-captivity

[darkangel218]

1. Thats a somewhat good idea, but

How are they going to stop the animals from eating/killing each other?

[Judi Lynn]

2. The only idea I could summons was putting barriers between the exhibits.

That information truly needs illuminastion from the author. I think it needs rewriting!