French architects Beckmann-N’Thépé and landscape designers TN+ have won a competition to remodel Korkeasaari Zoo in Helsinki, Finland.

The proposal involves creating a large glass-domed entrance and animal viewing building on the island zoo, and bringing back polar bears after a 30-year absence.

Here’s some info from the architects:

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BECKMANN-N’THEPE
sarl d’Architecture

KORKEASAARI ZOO
(Helsinki – Finlande)

Programme :
Redevelopment of helsinki Zoo / Landscape / greenhouses, auditorium, nocturama, reception office, souvenir shop, technical room, restaurant.

Architects:
Beckmann-N’Thépé Agency (Paris)
Aldric Beckmann, Françoise N’thépé
Landscape design:
TN Plus Agency (Paris)
Bruno Tanant, Jean Christophe Nani
Client:
City of Helsinki (Finlande)
Area:
26,2 ha
Cost:
NC
Delivery date:

Design team:
Project manager: Wilfried Daufy
Architects: Anne-Catherine Dufros
Assistant architects: Constance Héau, Jessica Pallatier
Landscape design: Guillaume Derrien, Agathe Turmel
Zoo expert: Jean Marc Lernould

TEXT:

The zoological island of Korkeasaari will be cut off again. Its architectural interventions will be concentrated to make it wild and mysterious once more – a park / garden as a place of popular privilege, the nobility of the future city.

Architecture disappears in favour of controlled geography, like the resurgence of a neighbouring landscape. The entrance grouping the set of utilities crucial to the running of the zoo becomes a focus of visual identity, somewhere between form and shapelessness, pierced with cavities.

Above: entrance lower level. Below: entrance upper level

Like layers of skin peeled back to receive an implant, there will be an above and a below that dialogue and interpenetrate one another. Areas of light, uncertainty, reflections and depths will be developed, offering the first emotions of a visit that will play on time and the seasons through four biozones :
- Central Asian Steppe
- Arctic Pole
- Asian Temperate Forest
- Central Asian Mountain

Above: polar bear enclosure