Orientarium, Łódź Zoo (Orientarium Zoo Łódź)

Łódź Zoo was founded in 1938 in the Polesie district on 8.9 hectares, enlarged to 16.64 hectares by 1950. Just after the war, in 1945, it received animals transferred from Wrocław Zoo. Its later history is marked by new pavilions, such as the big cat house of 1968 and the giraffe house built in 1988 for the fiftieth anniversary.

The Orientarium changed the scale of the place. The project was drawn up in 2016 by the ArC2 Fabryka Projektowa practice led by the architect Dorota Szlachcic, with engineering by Arup; the general contractor was Mosty Łódź SA. According to the zoo, construction began in 2018. The complex opened to the public on Friday 29 April 2022, just before the May holidays, at a reported cost of 262 million złoty. Crowds came at once: the zoo says it passed one million visitors by December 2022, and the contractor speaks of 1.5 million visitors a year.

Awards followed quickly. On 2 February 2023, at a ceremony in London, the International Property Awards honoured the building in the leisure architecture and public service architecture categories. The same year it received the SARP Award of the Year, described as Poland's highest architecture prize.

The Orientarium occupies a 7.6-hectare site, with a 19,900 m² footprint and 33,500 m² of usable floor space on three levels, one of them underground; its volume is about 170,000 m³. A 300-metre façade clad in bamboo slats is meant to merge the building into the greenery of the adjoining Piłsudski Park; the black bamboo echoes a motif the same architect had used for the Afrykarium in Wrocław, completed in 2014.

The large halls are roofed with ETFE film cushions, which let natural light through without heating up the way glass does. To spare the animals any columns, the roof rests on a light timber structure with spans of up to 50 metres; a five-sided suspended element nicknamed the “plumerium” is its signature feature. Visitor areas are kept at 26 °C in summer and 23 °C in winter, while animal and plant zones rise to 33 °C. Green roofs and walls, automatic rainwater harvesting, a 26-metre underwater tunnel and a conference centre of more than 5,200 m² complete the complex.

The complex presents the fauna and flora of South-East Asia in several zones: the Indian elephant house, whose pool can be watched from an underwater tunnel and which the zoo describes as the largest enclosure for the species in Europe; areas for palm civets, porcupines, junglefowl and macaques; an ocean zone with more than 1,300 fish, including sharks and rays; and finally the Sunda Islands zone, with crocodiles, Sumatran orangutans and gibbons. Tropical planting, which needs humidity of up to 70 per cent, accompanies these enclosures. The zoo counts 35 animal species in the main building and the contractor about 180 species of fish; gharials, anoa buffalo and sun bears are among the other residents.

The Orientarium is part of Łódź Zoo in the Polesie district, on the edge of Piłsudski Park; the tram stops on Konstantynowska Street bear its name. The route, punctuated by wooden bridges, terraces and a bamboo grove at the entrance, takes at least two hours, more with the rest of the zoo. Being fully enclosed, the halls suit a visit in bad weather or in winter. Łódź Botanical Garden, close by, and the city's Palmiarnia round off a day devoted to plants.