Southeast Asian Rainforest House (Kagu-Aasia vihmamets), Tallinn Zoo

Founded in 1939 and installed since 1983 on an 89-hectare site in Veskimetsa, Tallinn Zoo already had a tropical house completed in 1999 to a design by Rein Kersten. The Southeast Asian rainforest is a separate building, born from a municipal project called Pilvemets, meaning cloud forest. The Estonian Architecture Awards page dates the design to 2016 and the completion to 2023. ConArte OÜ designed the building and Ehitus5ECO OÜ built it; the zoo's director at the time described it as an original creation that copies no existing rainforest exhibit. Earthworks began in January 2021, the cornerstone was laid in August, the steel rafters went up in October, the hall was roofed in November and the topping-out ceremony took place on 15 December 2021.

The works aimed at delivery in summer 2022 and an opening in April 2023, to leave time for plants and animals to settle; visitors were finally admitted on 20 May 2023. The zoo puts the cost at 5.45 million euros (2.49 million from the European Regional Development Fund through the EAS agency, 2.96 million from the city), whereas the broadcaster ERR and the municipality give 5.28 million. By August 2023 the press reported a climate-control fault: the hall overheated when it was 30 °C outside, and ConArte blamed a roofing material that performed far worse than the manufacturer's data. Closed in autumn 2025, the hall received improved ventilation and heating; its reopening was announced for 4 May 2026, with replanted areas, reworked enclosures and upgraded terrariums.

The building stands on bored piles and a reinforced-concrete raft. In the exhibition zone the outer walls are 300 mm monolithic reinforced-concrete walls cast between formwork panels; the technical rooms are of concrete block. The zoo's construction diary describes steel rafters for the exhibition that support transparent, inflatable roof panels based on ETFE technology; the maximum height of 14.20 m was reached when the hall was roofed, in November 2021. The supplier Lightspan, which cites the project with 900 m², describes sheets of ETFE welded into cushions and inflated with low-pressure air.

On vocabulary, the construction diary and the supplier speak of ETFE, while the page written for visitors mentions a glass roof. Glass is, however, documented for the new restaurant facade, installed in March 2022. The artificial rocks are reinforcing mesh covered in sprayed concrete and finished by hand, and the building received a turf cover in May 2022. The interior landscape designers give a reference temperature of 27 °C with 75 to 90 per cent humidity. In 2023 ConArte judged the roofing material far less effective than expected; the ventilation and heating works of autumn 2025 address these regulation faults.

The route opens on a night forest, with bird calls and glowing insects, before emerging into the daytime forest. The interior landscape designers arranged the planting in sectors: food plants such as banana, cardamom and black pepper, a tree-fern 'forest', and tall palms where the height allows. A dead tropical trunk was brought in to show buttress roots. They note that a true rainforest cannot fit into so small a volume and that the free-moving animals shape the vegetation.

Those animals include silver pheasants and Nicobar pigeons, a colony of Lyle's flying foxes, Asian small-clawed otters, fishing cats and binturongs; the Estonian Wikipedia list adds tokay geckos, several pythons and a Chinese softshell turtle, among others. Bali mynas, a species the zoo says numbers fewer than 100 in the wild, take part in a breeding programme: three chicks hatched in April 2026. The flying foxes, including young born during the works, were back in their large fig tree, while the binturongs were still in an outdoor enclosure in early May 2026.

The hall stands in the middle of Tallinn Zoo, at Veskimetsa, about twelve kilometres as the crow flies from the botanic garden and its Palmimaja, already in the catalogue. Visitors enter through a tunnel from the entrance, and the tour moves from the dim night forest into tropical daylight; wet wooden boards can be slippery. The zoo describes the exhibit as warm all year round, which makes it a possible stop in any season. An interactive gallery follows the planted section, and a small restaurant offers views of the forest and of the tiger valley. A tactile plan, Braille panels, an induction loop and gentle slopes ease access. The 1999 tropical house, a separate building, stands in the same zoo.