This new zoo, which will become the icon of a new cultural and scientific life in Saint Petersburg, will evoke immemorial time, an era of monumental architecture when much land remained untouched by human development. Designed by architects, Françoise N’Thépé and Aldric Beckmann with landscape designers Bruno Tanant and Jean Christophe Nani, this fabricated urban development will evoke Pangea, the supercontinent described by German meteorologist and astronomer Alfred Wegener. The site appears ordinary as the land conceals some of the mysteries of our origins. It will be home to animal and scientific research where our most recent knowledge, our most advanced techniques create an enveloping environment for visitors to explore. More images and architects’ description after the break.
How do we render this encounter of two aesthetic worlds born of the unlikely overlap of modernity and eternity? We use Copernicus’ transition from the closed world to the infinite universe. According to contemporary German philosopher Sloterdijk, the fundamental form of nature and thought is the sphere. This will be the leitmotif of the following proposal. An optimistic figure of perfection, the sphere offers a gentle transition of the radical changes of the image of the world extending from the disc imagined by Ptolemy with its geo-centred circles to the globe; from the simple inhabited entity to the very incarnation of the world.
