Futuristic Entrance Plaza and Children’s Play Area
The Eight Thousand Two Hundred Fifteen is a futuristic project designed by Studio BONNER & Stayner Architects, and represents a proposal for a future entrance plaza and children’s play area for Zoo Miami and Miami-Dade Art in Public Places.
The idea of this project was to present a precarious position of the zoo in relation to the imaginary, and the natural environment it constructs. The 80,000 ft2 structure emerge from the uncontrollability of hydrology and urbanism, and is made from thousands of pre-cast and cast-in-place concrete surfaces that can mutate from the horizontal to vertical plan at key points, being both adaptive and constantly changing. The entire structure of two hundred pavers looks just like it’s levitating off the ground, and reveals an unexpected thinness. The architects thought about using different concrete technologies, including an extremely high-strength proprietary mixture and standard glass-fiber concrete mixes.
Since it’s a futuristic project, we’re thinking about as much sustainability as possible, that’s why there were created specific microclimates by using embedding tubes into the concrete, where the tiles becomes a living agent of physical organization and the chilled surfaces were created in order to remove humidity from the air, and the fans are also used to create air movements.
