Elephant House by Dick Blau & Nigel Rothfels

Author:Dick Blau & Nigel Rothfels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penn State University Press

[FIG. 2]

Interior of the Elephant House at the Zoological Gardens of Berlin, ca. 1876. Author’s collection.

[FIG. 3]

Exterior of the Elephant House at the Zoological Gardens of Berlin, ca. 1876. Author’s collection.

Constructed in the late 1950s with renovations and expansions in the ’80s and ’90s, the Asian Elephant Building at the Oregon Zoo today contrasts strikingly with the 1873 Elephant House in Berlin. Most obviously, while the Berlin building was fully intended to stand out as a human structure, the Oregon building is intended to be largely invisible and is designed almost entirely around the tasks of caring for elephants. Indeed, except for one room on the inside, Portland’s elephant house is almost entirely inaccessible to the public. The elephants are to be observed outside, something achievable in part because of the relatively mild weather in Portland. From the visitor’s perspective, the Asian Elephant Building consists of one indoor room and two outside yards—a front yard of 8,500 square feet and a back yard of over 25,000 square feet. Unlike the Berlin building, the outdoor spaces are not divided up into smaller enclosures for each animal of the building. These are open spaces with uneven surfaces and a sand substrate. Both yards have water elements; the water in the front serves as a pool and a barrier, while the water in the back is an 80,000-gallon pool allowing full submersion for the elephants. Although the building originally had simple 1950s lines, it is now hidden by artificial rockwork topped with plantings, designed to look a bit like a cliff with inset cavelike entrances to the building’s interior spaces. At about 15,000 square feet, the actual building in Portland is slightly larger in footprint than the old Berlin building, but this building shows none of the spectacular aspirations of the Berlin house. This is not a facility designed to showcase individual animals and situate the viewing public centrally; it meets the husbandry needs of a group of elephants, and while the exhibit exists because of public interest, the public, itself, has been moved to the periphery. Rather than walk by stalls housing individuals of different species, now the public watches groups of elephants interacting with each other in larger open areas and the building itself has, as much as possible, been made to look like a natural background.

The building is currently managed by a team of five full-time staff and a larger number of volunteers and interns. It is home to eight elephants, including Packy, who was born in Portland in 1962—the first elephant born in North America in over forty years—and Lily, who was born at the zoo exactly fifty years later, in 2012. In addition to these two, there are three other males: Rama, a son of Packy’s, born at the zoo in 1983; Tusko, a large wild-caught male born around 1971 who came to Portland from California in 2005; and Samudra (Sam), a son of Tusko and brother of Lily, born at the zoo in 2008. There are three

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