Societe Royale de Zoologie d'Anvers - ZOO Antwerpen - Projects

9 hours ago9 hr

Hi all!

On the road to Planet Zoo 2 there are some older builds in Planet Zoo 1 I wanted to share and give a proper send of. I was doubting on putting some shots of this park in the Dead & Lost Projects Tread but I took to many pictures and I wanted to share some real world pictures and blueprints too. So I decided to give the zoo it's own dedicated topic.

I've always been fascinated by classic city zoos. The animal welfare was horrible, don't enjoy that obviously, but the buildings, architecture, layouts and scientific way of clustering animals by species instead of regions is something I still enjoy today.

The Antwerp zoo is one of the oldest zoos in the world and was founded in 1843 in Belgium. In Belgian they speak both French and Flemish (similar to Dutch) so most of the pictures and blueprints will either be in French of Flemish. The zoo has a loooong history so for this recreation I had to pick a point in time to base the build on. I settled on the period between the 2 World Wars in Europe. The zoo was damaged in the 2th world war so I wanted to create the zoo in it's prime before the bombing. The zoo is build right up against Antwerp Central Station which is the reason it got bombed. After the war the zoo went trough a modernization period which greatly improved the animal welfare but also moved away from the classic architecture styles that I love.

I picked a map from 1933 as a base for this park. I love the Art Noveau/Jugendstil art and architecture and the zoo had just build quite a few buildings and enclosures around this time that fit this art style. The Zoo still exist today and I've visited multiple times. I'm also really happy that the zoo has preserved many of it's historic buildings so that they can still be enjoyed and admired today!

~Map time~

Like with my Blijdorp recreation I used an old map and digitally colored it. I also measured out a grid on top of it to help with the recreation. On this map you can clearly see the old gardens style layout with individual pavilions, exhibits and habitats sprinkled in between (in red). The large pink rectangle at the bottom is the train station. The Purple buildings on the is where the offices, zoo director home, festival palace (concert hall), museum, restaurant, cafe, winter garden and some shops/houses are located. This whole cluster of buildings is connected from both the inside and the outside of the zoo. The black buildings are private buildings (mostly homes) that surround the zoo.

This map is from the early 1920ties but is similar in how the zoo would have looked like in 1933. This map includes an English list on the right for those that don't read French of Flemish 😋

This is how far I got with the park. I focused mostly on the large building complex on the lower left. I did get around to finish of 2 habitats with the Bird of Prey Aviary and Moorish Temple that functions as Ratite house. I was working on the deer habitats and building before I gave up on the zoo. I also finished the layout of the large building complex, a few facades and did some work on the winter garden. For other main exhibits I did some placeholder buildings.

~Planet Facades~

For this post I wanted to focus on the building facades.

The closeup pictures of the facades are form the row of buildings that are facing the outside of the zoo (bottom row in purple on the map)

I'm very happy with how all these turned out. I build them one by one from the left to the right. It honestly felt really cool to build up a facade brick by brick from the bottom to the top. I love all the mosaic details on the real buildings and used a lot of ceramic tiles to try and replicate the look. Most of these facades still stand today but the storefronts have been replaced over the years and looks more modern and less detailed and ornate then they did before.

Stepping back reveals the unfinished edges haha. The big grey block is the one that houses the restaurant on ground level and has more housing on the top floors. The building all the way on the right houses offices for the zoo and was a placeholder facade.

The building on the most left still misses it's spire and roof. I never really figured out how to do the octagonal tower en pine cone like roof on top. This building had a portal on the ground floor that lead to the Festive Palace (Salle Des-Fetes - Feestpaleis) Concert Hall in the back. The top floors are connected internally with the second facade and that one housed the zoo director's home.

The broad building in the middle had 4 shops on ground level and more houses on the upper levels.