Damascus Zoo

Associated sub-consultant practices:

Cloud9 stuff - Arch. Enric Ruiz Geli BCN, Spain

Building area: 210,000 m2

Role(s) and services are provided with the practice staff:

Engineering design of the project related to all specialties (Architectural, Structural,

HVAC, Electrical, Plumbing and Landscaping) Construction Supervision,

Quality Control (QC), Project Planning.

Owning party: Governorate of Syria

Collaborative workshop between MAG team (Damascus, Syria) and

Cloud9 team (Barcelona, Spain). Several approaches have been implemented

to support group work with adapted office spaces and room elements, but none of them seemed to be a consistent solution.

Our motivation for this workshop was to gather researchers, architects,

zoologists, psychologists and computer scientists all together. We discussed

previous results in this area and shared our experiences about

the ultimate goal of finding emergent research questions and future

research directions.

The workshop ran for three weeks, started with the short presentations

of the participants. After presentations, an idea-finding session has

begun, where the most interesting issues of the workshop were

discussed.

In a plenary session following the sub-group work, each group presented

their ideas and discussed them with the rest of the workshop

participants. Both participants had the opportunity to expose gained

results and to identify issues that remain needy future research activities.

Nature and architecture. Nature in the site is understood as a fiction

(olive tree), the actors are animals, trees and the architecture of the

zoo should be the star.

People are the spectators here, the challenge

is how to discover the relation between nature and architecture.

Consequently our project is a represented nature with row materials

that becomes articulated through architecture.

The large area. Depending on the topography and consistence of the

surface, varying patterns and visual metaphor can come into being

the interaction with the nature, such as shadow or water stream images.

The interaction and superposition of surface materials, topography

and vegetation of olive tree create three dimensional spaces.

We are the nature.

In our project architecture is the language between

people and animals.

Hybrid space. Mother and father, human and nature, tree and person

- this could generate an adapting system of the project, an adapting

architecture to the needs of the people in each particular context.

Zoology: Darwin on our desks? In our design: in the scientific meaning

every organism breaks down into series of interrelated system (the

bones or structural system, the muscles; the arteries or system of fluid;

the skin, etc.). The buildings in the zoo from would be seen as a coherent

framework of systems: if one part gets eliminated, the whole organism

collapses.