At Fort Worth Zoo, a world-class collection is given a world-class home

Posted Saturday, Feb. 27, 2010
By CHRIS VAUGHN
cvaughn@star-telegram.com

FORT WORTH -- For years, Fort Worth Zoo Director Michael Fouraker and his top curator of coldblooded animals felt that many of nature's masterpieces weren't getting their due.

Creatures as artistically and evolutionally marvelous as the green mamba, Utila Island iguana and Chiricahua leopard frog lived in a plain-Jane box, a half-century-old building crumbling slowly from overuse by millions of energetic children and cramped keepers.

Fouraker and curator Diane Barber knew that a new "snake house" was needed for plumbing and electrical reasons alone. But they also imagined a place that elicited less screaming and more awe from children who have made the reptiles and amphibians some of the most popular animals at the park.

"If you take those same kids to a museum, they are quieter and more attentive," Fouraker said. "We kept thinking, 'How do we create that museum atmosphere where the kids look at the scales, the colors and the patterns of the animals, to where they stop and look and see what is really there in front of them?'"

Their answer was just to simply call it a museum, the Museum of Living Art.

What neither of them anticipated then, in the early 2000s, was that selecting that name would launch the zoo on a course no other zoo in North America had yet charted -- raising millions of dollars to build an architecturally significant and striking herpetarium for animals that have long lived in the shadows of the great apes, elephants and big cats.

"The building is extraordinary -- the feel of it, the shape of it, the concept we initiated," said Ramona Bass, who leads the zoo's board and is largely responsible for pulling off the exhibit. "I don't think there is a herpetarium like this on Earth. This building is a piece of architecture that stands up with the great works in Fort Worth."

Covering new ground

The $19 million Museum of Living Art -- MOLA, in shorthand, a riff on MOMA in New York -- opens to the public Saturday after more than two years of construction on the site of the old aquarium. It serves as the first significant exhibit addition since Texas Wild in 2001.

The world-renowned collection of reptiles and amphibians, enhanced with several major acquisitions in recent months, has been off-exhibit since August, when the zoo permanently closed the old herpetarium, the last vestige of the park before the Fort Worth Zoological Association took over management in 1991.

The 17,000-square-foot building will have large exhibits with multiple animals to give people a sense of what a desert or rain forest ecosystem looks like, as well as significantly larger exhibits for snakes such as the Burmese python and king cobra. The building also has an area where visitors can see hatchlings and tadpoles and get very close to the world's largest species of salamander.

Outside, an additional 13,000 square feet features a 15-foot saltwater crocodile, giant tortoises and more animals selected for their particular beauty: macaws, ring-tailed lemurs and golden lion tamarins. The zoo has also installed a 90,000-gallon tank and stocked it with turtles, fish and gharials, which officials hope will use the sandy beach to lay eggs.

Behind the public area, but equally important to zoo staff, are climate-controlled rooms for breeding, some for endangered species destined for release in the wild.

"They are treading new ground," said Kristin Vehrs, executive director of the Maryland-based Association of Zoos and Aquariums. "A lot of that goes to the specific interests of the staff at the Fort Worth Zoo, who have been working diligently for years on the global amphibian crisis. The zoo world expects great things from this exhibit."

No 'square box'

When the original herpetarium opened in 1960 -- with snake-handle doors -- it started charming youngsters immediately. The collection of animals was already impressive, one of the world's largest gathered under the new directorship of Lawrence Curtis.

Over the decades, Fort Worth solidified its reputation with coldblooded animals. But despite the growing diversity and prominence of the collection and the zoo's increased efforts to conserve and protect species in the wild, the building was going the other direction.

The plumbing was collapsing, the electrical system was overworked, and the walls and floors had developed cracks and holes -- where escaped animals could hide. Additionally, there were no quarantine areas, and the holding areas were cramped.

Fouraker told the Fort Worth City Council in 2001 that the zoo would build a new herpetarium on the site of the demolished aquarium because it was no longer feasible to keep either building functioning.

"Every day, we're putting more money into a sieve," Fouraker said then.

The zoo had $1.3 million in city bond money available. It had just completed the $40 million Texas Wild exhibit and wasn't planning on hitting the fundraising trail in a big way, so plans for the herpetarium were scaled back to a building roughly the size of the original.

"It was about a $5 million exhibit," Fouraker said. "We were going to build a plain box and hide it with bamboo."

But Bass was having nothing to do with it.

"I just wasn't going to be able to raise money for a square box," she said. "It wasn't going to happen."

The zoo had gone "native" with exhibits such as the World of Primates and gone "cultural" with exhibits such as Texas Wild, which features windmills, wagons and other Western touches.

Bass wanted something different, and jumping off the name Fouraker and Barber gave her, she started dreaming big.

"That led to the idea of building an art museum," Bass said. "Let's do something architecturally significant."

Lake/Flato of San Antonio started out as the architectural firm, but about four years ago, the zoo switched to Gideon Toal, a firm in downtown Fort Worth.

Michael Bennett, Gideon Toal's chief executive officer and the lead designer of the project, said he basically started over with a cardboard model of what he envisioned for the space. Only later did the architectural drawings come.

The zoo had already commissioned Gary Lee of CLR Design to design the animal exhibits, so the architecture came last.

"We didn't want to mess with the exhibits because they had spent a lot of time on those," Bennett said. "So we were left with putting the skin around the exhibits."

Unique to Fort Worth

Bennett's first design was intended to look more like the rolling hills of Texas, he said. From there, with Bass' suggestions, the concept transitioned to an aluminum-covered, undulating roof that gives the appearance of a scale-covered snake, which, not surprisingly, was tricky to pull off when it came time for construction.

"We had to figure out a system that could be built and keep the rain out," he said. "That was the hardest thing to do on the building. It was a very unique and customized feature."

Bass said she is particularly pleased with the selection of the West Texas limestone on the building because it is reminiscent of the Kimbell Art Museum and because the rough-cut stone in one section calls to mind the stone gates at the corner of Forest Park Boulevard and Park Place Drive.

"It fits in a natural setting," Bass said. "It's a piece of contemporary architecture that still fits within a zoo."

Originally, zoo leaders hoped to make the building "green," perhaps even LEED-certified. But that idea was scrapped because caring for coldblooded animals requires generous amounts of heat, humidity and sunlight.

Bass said the zoo switched to "eco-realism" for the building, such as collecting rainwater in cisterns, using recycled rubber for the floor and recycled plastic for the benches, and installing motion sensors on electric fixtures. The design of the roof, Bennett said, will also cut down on cooling costs.

"What we've tried to say is, 'Do what you can to be environmentally responsible,'" Bass said.

Some zoos are already looking at what Fort Worth has done, Fouraker said, and he expects more visibility in zoos from some of the smaller animals, particularly given the worsening crisis of disappearing turtles in Southeast Asia and amphibians worldwide.

But the Museum of Living Art, he said, may be unique to Fort Worth and its long history of reptiles and amphibians.

"I don't know that we would have taken this leap if we did not have the legacy here," Fouraker said. "We had the collection. We had the conservation programs in place. We know how popular it has been with our visitors.

"We might not have convinced the board, without those foundations, to make this large of a commitment to coldbloodeds."

http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/02/27/2002590/at-fort-worth-zoo-a-world-class.html