Paris landscape designers TN Plus and architects Beckmann N’Thépe have designed 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.

 

 

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.

 

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)

 

Source: Dezeen