Wild Sea Exhibition, Melbourne Zoo, Vic, 2009

Wild Sea is an immersive experience for interpreting the diverse ecology of the Victorian Coastline. In creating a world-class interpretive environment as a conservation-facility for seals, penguins, rays, fish, seabirds-and-more, it also seeks to educate each of us as to how we might play a part in preserving such diversity.
 
The site is developed as a journey from the familiar-to-the-unfamiliar - over friendly ‘estuaries’, along ‘beaches’, and down into the unsettling theatre of ‘The Deep’.

Exhibition space is organised around a journey designed to sequentially reveal from-land-to-sea the environments/habitats that make up the marine-eco-system that is the Victorian Coast. Learning-nodes and gathering/pause spaces allow for regulation of circulation-flow at peak times, and then there’s double-B-pram parking...

Shrouding necessary strutcures, architectural textures and forms are inspired by the Victorian Coast and its creatures.

Mellowing timbers draw from driftwood and dune-fencing. Acrylic claddings express the sea lapping the coast, transforming with the passing of light. ...Or are they scales?

Above, are shades, operable in rhythm with the seasons - critical in managing healthy water environments and to afford public shelter - and evocative of skinned marine skeleta and fins and water-bird feet and...

Back-of-house, there is a complex of off-exhibit care, keeper-facilities and life-support-systems.

in rhythm with the seasons - critical in managing healthy water environments and to afford public shelter - and evocative of skinned marine skeleta and fins and water-bird feet and...

Back-of-house, there is a complex of off-exhibit care, keeper-facilities and life-support-systems.