Modern Architecture for Elephants

The guarantee the buildings they design are perfectly suitable to their users is one of the responsibilities of the architectures. If sometimes this task is difficult because of certain particularities of certain people, imagine when the users are not human (and neither inhuman) and, besides, huge. That's what happened with the elephants pavilion at the Copenhagen Zoo, in Denmark, conceived by the architect Norman Forster.
A group of Indian elephants are the happy lessees of this new edification which tries to recreate, as much as possible, their natural habitat. Two big spaces allow to the animals the opportunity to reunite and even sleep together -- the opposite of what usually happens in captivity. The cover is a glazed structure in the shape of a bubble which simulates the ambiance produced by the crowns of the trees. Inside, there are still the inevitable puddles of water and mud, necessary to the life of these elephants, and even some refinements, like the warmed floor.