Another Vertical Zoo project comes to us this time from Architizer, a relatively new site offering a kind of social networking service for the architecture community. This Zoo is drawn up by James Biber of Pentagram and from what we can see differs very little from other vertical zoos posted on Animal Architecture — well, this one’s a bit more diagrammatic than most. This entry would appear to have been Pentagram’s proposal for the Buenos Aires competition a few weeks back, and while the winning entry was a bit outrageous, it certainly had more inventiveness than this version. But first from Architizer:
Today 80 percent of the world’s zoos are located in cities, and a vertical zoo seems as inevitable as a vertical farm. A new competition in Buenos Aires, Argentina asked architects to design a vertical zoo for a location in a natural reserve on the city’s riverfront. Organized by Arquitectum and TodoObras magazine, the brief was to design a structure that would become a new urban landmark, one that would accentuate a growing area of the city and at the same time complement the natural character of the reserve. Pentagram has designed a vertical zoo that is an urban take on Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life, a phylogenic arrangement of species in vertical formation.
The prosaic design aside we can’t see how the arrangement and placement of each species of animal in the section offers any greater insight or value to this building as a Zoo. That and the spurious relationship between vertical zoo and vertical farming outlined in the brief has our alarm-sirens ringing full-tilt. We would love to see the rest of these Buenos Aires vertical zoos — maybe there actually was a winner in the bunch.
