CHILDREN’S ZOO

Within Alabama’s urban center, designers and owners programmed five acres of partially-forested land to serve as an oasis for the public exploration of the state’s rich native habitats.  With a playful and inspiring program, Giattina Aycock Architecture Studio designed fantastical places and paths with a mission to acquaint children with the wonders of nature and introduce notions of history, biodiversity and conservation.

Chiseled concrete rock ledges mark the entry to the Children’s Zoo, echoing the iron-rich mountain that is the local economy’s historical foundation.  From here, the design team carved a sequence of spaces moving from a developed habitat dominated by humans, through a pastoral landscape, and finally an immersion in a native wilderness where the sights, sounds and smells of wild animals and plants dominate.  Along the way, visitors climb over a rock playground, splash through interactive fountains, pet farm animals in a heavy timber barn of authentic mortise and tenon construction, ride a carousel of endangered species under a luminous tensile structure, wander through a bog and behind a waterfall to explore exhibits in child-sized caves.

At the center of it all stands a monumental vine-shaded concrete arbor and a linear Commons Building housing food service, classrooms, gift shops and restrooms.  A giant, sculptural gutter captures roof runoff and carries the rainwater to exposed cisterns, where it is stored and used to irrigate the landscape during seasonal droughts.  Beneath the arbor, families congregate to rest in the fountains’ cool breezes and watch children play around the mountain, in the water and on the carousel.

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