Zoo orchestrates exoticism

[imomus]

While we were at Berlin Zoo on Friday, a baby giraffe was being born. We didn't get to see Inga, but did catch a disappointing glimpse of the last big zoo baby star, Knut the polar bear. Knut is rather disappointing, a dirty yellow colour and already quite big. To see him you have to join crowds held back by crash barriers. Meanwhile, a much cuter baby donkey and baby camel were being ignored, presumably because they hadn't been featured in the media.



My main interest at Berlin Zoo, though, is the graphic design. It hits all sorts of buttons for me:

* Kitschy primitive paintings and diagrams of animals counterbalanced by

* Didactic, restrained, very German 20th century sans serif faces, including some nice Helvetica.

* But also a total eccentric eclecticism -- as at the Natural History Museum in New York, there's no attempt to harmonize the clashing styles of different sections.

* Odd materials -- the history of elephants told with tiles, for instance.

Put this together with the weird national references in the pavilion architecture -- zebras get a mosque-like structure, bulls a teutonic barn, the goats a tiny alp with a tarred wooden hut perched on a crag -- and you get a confection of continuous exoticism, an eccentric spectacle of eccentricity, and strangeness strangely narrated.

Comments

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

The illustrations remind me so much of the Los Angeles Zoo! Although the L.A. Zoo is really boring, and has way too many hills. I heard that one time an employee saw an elderly couple going up the hill to see some animals, and offered them a ride on his little car. He came back down, and he ended up having to give every one of the obese people a ride up. He spent about an hour doing it. Ugh, America sometimes!

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

*Disclaimer: yes, some obese people are really nice people, but some are just outright lazy.