Architect Bjarke Ingels proposes to turn the traditional zoo model on its head, allowing animals freedom to roam while humans remain below ground, obscured by the natural landscape, or encased in mirrored pods.
Visitors will be able to observe lions from a bunker buried beneath a hill and peep at pandas through a bamboo screen. They will look at bears from a little house hidden in a stack of tree-trunks, and gawp at giraffes through holes cut into a hillside.
According to the architect's website: "It is our dream to create the freest possible environment for the animals' lives and relationships with each other and visitors."
Ingels hopes to "enhance both the quality of life for the animals as well as the keepers and guests ... but also to discover ideas that we will be able to transfer back to the concrete jungle".
“Who knows, perhaps a rhino can teach us something about how we live – or could live in the future?”
The futuristic, cage-free zoo will open in 2019.
