gorilla kingdom london zoo, regents park, london w1 · 2020. 7. 14. · gabon - all configured...

86 Proctor and Matthews Archi tects 87

Sed non purus. Proin quis

neque nec felis sodales

pellentesque. Proin purus.

primis in faucibus orci

luctus et ultrices posuere

cubilia Curae.

Gori l la KingdomLondon Zoo, Regents Park, London W1

Gori l la Kingdom

Bui ldings and Projects

The Gorilla Kingdom project is viewed by the Zoological Society of London as the most significant restructuring of London Zoo for forty years. The scheme focuses on the zoo’s wider strategy of providing enlarged and enhanced animal enclosures and removing (where possible) bars, cages and the visually obtrusive barriers that separate animals from visitors.

The design evolved over a two year collaborative dialogue with a team of in-house project advisors, animal experts, keepers and external consultants to create an immersive landscape and visitor attraction which will highlight the plight of western lowland gorillas and other native species of the African rainforests of the Congo and Gabon.

Early concepts for a biome structure made in ETFE were abandoned when a gorilla escaped from its enclosure in Dallas Zoo in March 2004. The resultant need for higher and more robust enclosures required a radical rethink. The client’s reassessment focussed the brief around the partial demolition (not the total demolition as envisaged with the biome) of the existing Sobell Pavilions which have housed primates since the 1970s.

The provision of new night quarters, a day gym, and visitor viewing areas, creating the backdrop for both face-to-face encounters with the animals and in parallel providing greater insight into Zoological Society of London’s fieldwork with the great apes of Gabon - all configured around the remaining framework of existing animal buildings, became the central theme of the studies.

New enclosures for diana monkeys, colobus monkeys, nile monitors, African tree frogs and white collar mangabes, together with a new aviary for lilly hoppers, Congo pea fowl and superb starlings are provided. In addition, the brief called for an area for corporate events - a new space where conservation agendas can be explained and promoted.


The design offers a series of viewpoints from which the visitor observes and is observed by the gorillas. These views unfold around a promenade, following a moat that bounds the gorillas new paddock and culminating in the boardwalk structures. The form and detailed design of this viewing enclosure evokes the culture and materials of the Gorillas, natural habitat without the need for Disneyesque pastiche.

Ideas of short and long-term, built in, flexibility and adaptability are explored with the concept of the ‘folded’ boardwalk structure acting as the armature around which simple and robust animal enclosures and night quarters can be regularly and radically changed as animal husbandry techniques evolve.

This is a deliberate departure from the ‘geometric’ approach of Berthold Lubetkin and the concept of animals as theatre ‘in an atmosphere comparable to that of a circus’,

with fixed sculptural forms designed to dramatise animal performance.1 Instead the visitor promenade becomes the framework around which animal environments can change and evolve over time.

The boardwalk is made from rich red ekki hardwood (recycled railway sleepers) and the ceiling and walls are clad in douglas fir faced ply panels patterned with cut-out sections and stripes of paint inspired by the rhythmic Kuba fabric patterns of the Congo region. The visitor boardwalk is separated from the gorillas by a glass wall which is supported laterally by the canopy columns. The columns are made from bamboo, a material reference to the gorillas’ natural habitat (the first use of structural bamboo in the UK). Here ZSL can hold corporate events and promote conservation agendas relating to the gorillas’ natural environment.

The boardwalk spaces are enclosed beneath a proprietary multicell polycarbonate system, used externally as roofing and wall cladding,

Gori l la Kingdom





Vestibulum ante ipsum



cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.

1 B. Lubetkin ‘Dudley Zoo’ unpublished typescript c.1938. Quoted in Berthold Lubetkin – Architecture and the tradition of Progress – John Allen RIBA Publications 1992.








cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.

combined with a perforated timber inner cladding. This provides a patterned daylighting effect within the visitor viewing areas, which not only makes cultural references to the Kuba fabric patterns but also suggests the dappled light of a rainforest canopy.

The visitor canopy is ‘fractured’ next to the day gym, allowing light to penetrate to the ‘rainforest’ floor. Here landscape architect Graham Pockett located bamboo and broad-leafed trees (magnolia grandiflora and eucryphia ex nymansensis), echoing a passage from Travels in West Africa (1897) by Mary Kingsley: ‘Some stretches of forest were made up of thin spindly stemmed trees of great height, and among these stretches I always noticed the ruins of some forest giant, whose death by lightning or by his superior height having given the demoniac tornado wind an extra grip on him, had allowed sunlight to penetrate the lower regions of the forest; and then evidently the seedlings and saplings who had for years been living a half-starved life for light, shot up.’







cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.

Gori l la Kingdom

92 Proctor and Matthews Archi tects 93Bui ldings and Projects

Gori l la Kingdom






cubilia Curae.






cubilia Curae.








cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.


Gori l la Kingdom


Gori l la Kingdom







cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.






cubilia Curae.


Gori l la Kingdom


Gori l la Kingdom







cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.







cubilia Curae.

gorilla kingdom london zoo, regents park, london w1 · 2020. 7. 14. · gabon - all configured...

Documents