This May, eight orangutans will move into their new home at the Indianapolis Zoo, where visitors will have a rare chance to get up close and personal with Asian great apes by literally hanging out with them. Workers are busy putting the finishing touches on the zoo's $26-million International Orangutan Center, which houses three buildings and 11 surrounding towers connected by a roughly 80-ft-high aerial cableway that allows the apes to move around the 2-acre exhibit and swing high above viewers. The project also includes a 60-ft-tall suspended gondola ride spanning 1,000 ft around the perimeter of the site, where visitors will be able to view the orangutans up close from the air.
A typical orangutan—the name in Malay translates into "person of the forest"—needs regular upper-body exercise to stay fit, and the exhibit aims to preserve the endangered species by stimulating the animals physically and cognitively. "We had to design a facility that let people get to know orangutans the way those of us who work with them know them," says Rob Shumaker, the zoo's vice president of conservation and life sciences. "Orangutans are perfectly adapted for living in the trees, so we had to give them spaces that function just like trees." The design team, led by local architect Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Inc., decided early on to use modern materials to mimic the environment of a forest—without trying to fake the look of the real thing. "Oddly enough, there aren't a lot of facilities that promote that," explains Jonathan Hess, president of BDMD. "So, the exhibit started to get taller."