Architect: Beckmann-N’Thépé architects – Aldric Beckmann, Françoise N’thépé Landscape design : TN+ / Bruno Tanant & Jean-Christophe Nani Location: Helsinki, Finland Project Manager: Wilfried Daufy Project Architect: Anne-Catherine Dufros Assistant Architects: Constance Héau, Jessica Pallatier Landscape design team: Guillaume Derrien & Agathe Turmel Zoo expert: Jean Marc Lernould Constructed Area: 26,2 ha
The zoological island of Korkeasaari will be cut off again. Its architectural interventions will be concentrated to make it wild and mysterious once more – a park / garden as a place of popular privilege, the nobility of the future city.
Architecture disappears in favour of controlled geography, like the resurgence of a neighbouring landscape. The entrance grouping the set of utilities crucial to the running of the zoo becomes a focus of visual identity, somewhere between form and shapelessness, pierced with cavities.
Like layers of skin peeled back to receive an implant, there will be an above and a below that dialogue and interpenetrate one another. Areas of light, uncertainty, reflections and depths will be developed, offering the first emotions of a visit that will play on time and the seasons through four biozones:
- Central Asian Steppe
- Arctic Pole
- Asian Temperate Forest
- Central Asian Mountain
