Response Questions 3 WEEK-3

In the zoo’s public mission Hornaday, Blair, and Osborn as leaders of the Bronx Zoo pushed for Wildlife Protection, Educational. Scientific Fields, Conservation (of natural resources such as, forests, grass, soil . . .etc.). In terms of design Osborn instituted changes by luring the public back to conservation, along with how our use of our limited natural resources will affect the future of wildlife that living within those natural environments. The pros of the African Plains was that in the 1940s they received anonymous funding from a benefactor who was the department store owner of Marshall Field, the zoo was more realistic having native plants for the animals, consisted of a more detailed and informative descriptions for the visitors to read before or while watching the animals at the zoo. The cons were that the human visitors continued to be placed outside the scene. They were still separated from the naturalistic landscape looking out and into a stage set. Hancocks praised the Bronx Zoo because of the fact that the zoo precipitated a revolution on its home ground, setting the stage for a remarkable run during the past thirty years of new exhibits and the consistency in setting the highest standards for all their exhibits.

The major innovations that were introduced at the Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo was the fact that they were the first to ever take priority on animals over visitors, clients, or workers at the park. What made Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo different from other was the fact that they classified each animal based on the environment that they lived such as by the temperature, precipitation, and habitats . . . etc.  The radical departure that zoo’s committed to the “landscape immersion approach” was the departure from conventional zoo design because it reflected a pronounced shift in philosophy from the homocentric to the biocentric view, and noted what Joe Coe, one of the planning team members, explains as the basic conservation approach that says we just live here, we don’t own the earth, the owns us. The new approach allowed the viewer to become physically and psychologically immersed in the stimulated created habitat.

Wilson implies that visitors at the zoos prefer watching an animal that is living naturally like it would in the wild, rather than staring at an animal in a cage doing nothing. Wilson states that a zoo incorporates natural elements such as trees, plants, temperature, soil, and many other wildlife elements where the animal originates. This then initially then gives the visitors at the zoos an opportunity to actually experience, embrace, and learn by observing how the animal lives in the wild.