Wooden platform near Basel elephant enclosure, Basel
2017
From here you have an overview of the new savannah landscape of the elephants at Basel Zoo. The wooden platform is slightly elevated and allows a view of almost the entire elephant enclosure. Since mid-March 2017, the animals have had significantly more room to move.
The project
During three and a half years, a new home was created for the four elephant cows of the Basel Zoo. The new elephant enclosure called "Tembea" (Kiswahili for "on the move") is 5300 square meters in size. This near-natural savannah landscape offers the animals two and a half times as much space as the previous facility to let off steam. At the elephant enclosure, zoo visitors also get their money's worth: they can observe the pachyderms in their home from a new wooden viewing platform, which is actually a high perch.
The construction:
The visitor platform is slightly elevated on the zoo's slope, about five meters above the ground, providing a great view of the enclosure.
The construction
The platform consists entirely of cross-laminated timber panels made of spruce and fir. The floor slab was clamped into the reinforced concrete columns via the longitudinal reinforcement. The clamping was done by bonding the reinforcement to the timber slab.
The challenge
The floor plan of the platform was modeled on the head of an elephant. The staircase has the abstract shape of a trunk, the platform itself represents the head. The gray color of the facade is also reminiscent of elephants. Due to the unusual ground plan, the viewing platform does not have any right angles. The staircase becomes increasingly wider from the approach to the platform, and the platform also opens towards the front. These geometric peculiarities therefore required special solutions from the timber engineers in terms of both statics and design.
Construction Data
- Cross laminated timber 36 m3
- Three-layer board spruce/fir 60 m2
Services of Timbatec
- SIA Phase 31 Preliminary design
- SIA Phase 32 Construction project
- SIA Phase 41 Tendering and comparison of offers
- SIA Phase 51 Implementation project
Architect
Studio Vulkan GmbH
8048 Zurich
Client
Zoologischer Garten
4011 Basel
Timber construction engineer
Timbatec Holzbauingenieure Schweiz AG, Zurich
8006 Zurich
Timbatec planned the new stork platform at the Zoo Basel
Wir HOLZBAUER, March 2019 - A GLANCE OF THE WOOD TUBES. Last spring, more young storks than ever before grew up in Basel Zoo. Stork Lenny - with around 1600 Facebook fans the star of the Basel stork population - also looked after his offspring there. A total of 58 stork chicks were distributed over 24 nests - which can finally be seen by visitors to the zoo from the newly erected wooden viewing platform. Timbatec planned this exciting project on a steep slope. You can read more about the viewing platform in Dorothee Bauland's five-page report in the March issue of the magazin Wir Holzbauer.
We rely on timber
bauRundschau 2/17 - In earlier centuries, timber as a building material was a matter of course in cities. In the 20th century, however, timber largely disappeared from urban space. In 1993, the first three-story timber buildings were still considered pioneering achievements. A lot has changed since then: Today, 100 meter high timber buildings are already being built in urban centers and timber is used in a wide variety of construction projects. The "bauRundschau" uses five groundbreaking projects to show just how diverse the building material timber is used today. Among other things, the trade magazine presents projects in which Timbatec was or still is significantly involved, including the "sue & til" residential development in Winterthur, the Arborea residential building in Köniz and a new viewing platform in Basel Zoo.
