Zoo InternQuest is a career exploration program for high school students. For more information see the Zoo InternQuest Journals. For more photos see the Zoo InternQuest Photo Journal.

Imagine a 15,000-pound elephant’s 18-inch foot descending gently above your head while another elephant ambles slowly past. The new elephant exhibit currently under construction at the San Diego Zoo will make this concept a reality. The exhibit, to be called Elephant Odyssey, is a 7-acre habitat that has, as its focus, a 2.5-acre free-roaming area for up to 9 elephants. This expansive landscape includes a 120,000-gallon pool and special viewing areas to observe the elephant management facility where keepers care for the elephants.

The distinctive take on this exhibit is that it will highlight animals that roamed across California’s landscape as recently as 10,000 years ago. Illustrating the diverse history of California’s prehistoric animals and featuring their living relatives, this exhibit will allow visitors to explore California’s past through entertaining and interactive exhibits including fossil digs and natural landscaping.

As children climb over the life-size statues of an American lion, a saber-toothed cat, and a capybara, adult visitors sitting comfortably in a spacious restaurant plaza will gaze at the Asian elephant splashing happily in its swimming hole. This project, a $45 million undertaking, is the largest multispecies habitat ever built at the Zoo and is a complex interface between keepers and architects. Steve Fobes, the project architect for the Zoological Society of San Diego on this exhibit, says that zoo architecture is a very different style than the design of an office park and involves collaboration between everyone involved.

From acknowledging the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) regulations and considering the potential of crowds when designing visitor viewing areas to achieving United States Department of Agriculture regulations and meeting AZA’s requirements, Mr. Fobes says that designing an exhibit involves many challenges. He notes, however, that the regulations are rarely a concern because the Zoo’s enclosures always exceed the minimum requirements of these regulatory organizations. The main challenges are to meet the needs of the most particular inhabitants of an exhibit, ranging from the condor that prefers low and colorful perches to a tapir that will only swim if the water exactly reaches his nose when fully submerged.

In the real world, picky animals are no different than hard-to-please clients, and therefore private practice architecture is a lot like architecture in the zoological world. Mr. Fobes says that the biggest adjustment he had to make was the realization that in the zoological world, people come to see the animals, not the buildings!

Ronit, The Real World Team

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