Title: Zoo Atlanta Zambezi Elephant Center
Location of Proejct: Atlanta, Georgia
Project Completion Date: 6/17/19
Firm Name: Epsten Group

Short Description: Zambezi Elephant Center, which is a part of Zoo Atlanta’s Grand New View series of projects, is its new LEED Gold certified care quarters for up to seven African elephants. Designed with animal welfare in mind, Zambezi Elephant Center serves the zoo’s new African Savanna exhibit and emphasizes the “four C’s of animal wellness”: comfort, companionship, challenge, and choice. The building also emphasizes zoo staff wellness by maximizing natural daylight and providing lofted office and personal care space and includes a large public viewing room for observing the elephants in their care quarters during cold winter months.

Architect's Statement: Zambezi Elephant Center marks a dramatic step forward for Zoo Atlanta as AZA accredited institutions continue to improve the size and quality of elephant habitats and care quarters across the country. At 15,500 square feet Zambezi Elephant Center building is actually larger than the zoo’s previous outdoor African elephant habitat and its two outdoor habitats represent a roughly eightfold increase in outdoor space. It will be the home for up to seven African Elephants and serve as a breeding facility for Zoo Atlanta as it attempts to fill this need within AZA’s Species Survival Plan (SSP). The facility was designed to incorporate the best practices in animal welfare for African Elephant care quarters, all of which is made visible from an indoor winter viewing room so that Zambezi Elephant Center tells a story to the zoo’s visitors about the high level of care the zoo gives to this and all the species under its care.
Zoo Atlanta, like all AZA accredited institutions, is dedicated to providing the highest levels of animal welfare possible. For Zambezi Elephant Center, our design team emphasized Dr. David A. Washburn’s “Four C’s” of animal wellness. First, comfort. This included the strategies to provide amply sized areas for the elephants, natural substrates in the care quarters stalls, and designing to maximize hygiene and provide functional areas for veterinary procedures. Second, companionship. Elephants are very social animals that like to interact and form herd relationships with other elephants, even elephants that aren’t blood related. Zambezi Elephant Center’s flexibility allows the zoo’s keepers to combine elephants in multiple combinations to form those herd communities. Third, challenge. All animals require physical and mental challenge and stimulation to remain sharp. Zambezi Elephant Center provides multiple attachment points for hay nets, specialized feeders, and other forms of enrichment. Also, adjacent to the care quarters, a concrete enrichment wall includes holes for hanging buckets with treats, encouraging the elephants to use the dexterity of their trunks to get what’s on the other side. Last, and most important, Zambezi Elephant Center provides choice to the elephants. Free will is important to the mental wellness of animals under human care. The adjacent paddocks are kept accessible to the animals during the night. Likewise, during the day, the two main habitat yards were purposefully designed to provide different degrees of repose from the visitors, allowing the elephants to move to a more distant position if they so choose.
Zambezi Elephant Center and its adjacent outdoor habitats were also designed to promote maximum flexibility. This allows the zoo to combine the herd into multiple social groupings to promote optimal mental health for the elephants, separate elephants who are conflicting, promote mating, or accommodate maternity scenarios. The care quarters can be reconfigured to provide separate rooms for each of the seven elephants or allow for free access for groups to interact at their leisure, and the whole barn is capable of holding both bull and cow elephants. Stalls are primarily natural sand substrate floors with two stalls having concrete floors as needed for quarantine and/or maternity events. The whole elephant space is accessed by a large keeper corridor that is sufficient width for skid loaders and a continuous trench drain for daily washing and hygiene activities. The space is a large free span structure that also maximizes natural daylight and allows for an overhead 7.5-ton bridge crane for emergency medical care. The adjacent loading dock is also amply sized for driving small equipment and for the docking of large container trailers for hay deliveries.
In keeping with Zoo Atlanta’s conservation mission, sustainability was also a central component of the Zambezi Elephant Center. The zoo exceeded the requirements for projects built on a City leasehold by achieving LEED Gold certification for the building. From a sustainability standpoint, the greatest challenges came from the need to design the building and systems to meet the needs of megafauna that can reach up to 13-feet tall and over 6 tons in weight while still adhering to performance standards written for human-scaled facilities. The structure and enclosure design of the facility includes insulated pre-cast concrete panels where the skin of the building can be accessed by the elephants, giving the thermal performance and structural strength required. The rest of the skin is primarily a mix of insulated concrete panels and a clerestory of translucent fiberglass panels that contributes to a design meant to maximize natural daylight inside the elephant space. In concert with the enclosure design, energy-efficient LED lighting, and efficient HVAC systems and controls, the project was able to demonstrate a 16.9% energy cost saving relative to a standard baseline building even though the facility also exceeds the code minimum supply of fresh outdoor air by over 30% as necessary to promote maximum health and wellness for the elephants.