Designer Hailed for Giving Zoo a Natural Look : Design: Low-key architect David Rice will be honored by his peers for creating a new look that puts San Diego Zoo animals in a natural setting.

Just about any architect will tell you that clients can be animals. Architect David Rice’s latest certainly qualify. You can’t really blame them for being temperamental. They’re still just kids, really, a young couple in their 20s. But they’re big (350 pounds each) and loud and hairy, and sometimes they even spit at him.

No, it wasn’t an easy job designing a new home for Memba, 21; his wife Alvila, 26, and a crew of youngsters. But Rice persevered, and, in March, the couple’s new $12-million, 2.5-acre estate, known as Gorilla Tropics, will open at the San Diego Zoo.

Rice, 40, is the zoo’s director of architecture and planning. Friday night, in honor of his contributions to the planning and design of the zoo, the local American Institute of Architects chapter will give him one of nine Special Service awards during ceremonies at a local restaurant.

According to those who work with him, Rice is much more than an administrator; during numerous workshops, he has been a major contributor to both the zoo’s new master plan, completed in 1984, and the design of four new exhibits since: the Kopje, Tiger River, Sun Bear Forest and Gorilla Tropics.

Rice has worked full time for the zoo since 1976 and was promoted to his present post in 1979. Tall (6-foot-7) and congenial, he is not at all prone to blowing his own horn. But others testify to the important role he has played in reshaping the zoo.

“When it comes to the leading concept behind what they’re doing, in both the master plan and exhibit design, it’s David that’s behind it all, but he doesn’t take the glory on himself,” said Johnpaul Jones, a principal at Jones & Jones, the Seattle specialists in zoo design who collaborated with Rice on both the master plan and the design of all four new exhibits.

Based on a concept of bioclimates, the master plan subdivides the zoo into climatic zones inhabited by combinations of plants and animals found together in nature. This is a radical change from the zoo’s old days, when tigers kept company only with tigers and birds with birds.

The San Diego Zoo isn’t the first to use the idea of bioclimates--Jones & Jones helped the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle implement bioclimates in the early 1970s. But Jones credits Rice for deciding on bioclimates as the most effective way of reorganizing the San Diego Zoo.

Gorilla Tropics is part of the zoo’s Tropical Rain Forest bioclimate. The new exhibit gives the gorillas roughly 20 times the useable space they had before. Their new home isn’t far from where they were before, but it is much more sophisticated, with room for a growing family.

“They are social animals, and they are pretty obviously big strong animals, primarily terrestrial,” Rice said. “We feel there will be a group mass that needs to be attained--as many as eight individuals per group in two groups.” (The exhibit will open with Memba, Alvila and four youngsters.)

“They’re shy. They need to have a real sense of where their space is, in a place that they’re comfortable in. If not, they look stressed out. They don’t like to have direct eye contact. The new exhibit provides them with a variety of distances from people.”

In addition to a daytime space that makes the gorillas feel more protected from throngs of tourists, they are getting a new nighttime bunker better-suited to their social habits. They used to sleep in rooms that housed one or two of them, but they prefer spending nights together as a family. The new nighttime enclosure will have rooms big enough for several individuals. It will also have heated floors on which the gorillas can spread their beds of straw.

Working Gorilla Tropics into its hilly site was tough.

“The gorillas used to be in a little enclosure on the side of a hill, but they need room to move, and we wanted to get them onto flatter spots,” Rice said. “It was difficult in some ways. We ended up making flat terraces on big, artificial rock escarpments that became very expensive.”

Rice has visited a real rain forest, and was asked how the zoo’s rain forest stacks up.

“You get little snips of the feeling, but the main difference is ours is cleaner,” he said. “Tiger River has got some of that feeling you get in the rain forest, but it doesn’t have as many of the huge trees you see in the rain forest. The zoo’s version tends to be more idealistic and gardenesque than the real thing.”

Still, it’s an improvement over old ideas of zoo design.

“In the old urban zoos, you were in a pedestrian street and the animals were off to the side of the sidewalk,” Rice said. “This (Gorilla Tropics) tries to be a compressed piece of Africa with animals in it, with a walk going through it. We manipulate the barriers and terrain to make it so you don’t necessarily know where the exhibit starts and stops. We try to give some illusion that the landscape goes and goes and goes.

“The idea at Gorilla Tropics is you’re walking through an African tropical rain forest, and there’s all this lush, tropical vegetation, and, as much as possible, you encounter the animals in that landscape as you go along.”

Rice is hoping that the gorillas make a smoother transition to their new home than the sun bears did in theirs in 1989.

“We opened at the end of June, and they decimated it--they had really worked it over in about six weeks.

“The thing that happened was, the kinds of individuals we expected to put in the exhibit and the individuals we actually put in were two different things. We had a couple of mature bears, but what we put in there were five juvenile delinquents. They just went wild.

“They got out almost right away, they were able to scramble up and out. So we fixed that right off, and it took a while before they turned back to the walls again and started to make bear pyramids to get out.

“I made a mistake thinking I could sod the inside of the exhibit and end up with green turf that could be established. There wasn’t enough time, and the sod didn’t knit, and the first thing they did was, they started rolling up the sod and throwing it in the moat.

“When they were done with that, we had dead trees for them to climb on, and they took all the bark off, looking for insects, and threw it in the moat too. One of the things we put in to encourage activity was an artificial tree that had a honey feeder in it. They were done with the real trees, so they started ripping that apart.

“We put in more concrete on slopes where grass wouldn’t work. We took the artificial tree out and put in a lot more dead trees. They’re pretty happy now, there’s more for them to do. But the disappointing part of it for me is that I wanted a strong inside-outside connection. It’s pretty lush outside of the exhibit, but inside, it’s got too much hardscape.”

Rice has a degree in architecture from the University of Arizona. He sharpened his first drafting pencils as a pro at the local firms Krommenhoek, McKeown & Associates and Salerno/Livingston & Co. But nothing prepared him for the complicated design problems involved with moving 3 million people a year through a synthesized swatch of nature covering 100 acres and housing 3,500 animals.

“It is a very different design language, a different way of thinking. What they teach you in school is to be a problem solver, to use design to solve problems in a rational way,” Rice said during a walk through the zoo, pausing on a mist-shrouded bridge in Tiger River, the $6 million exhibit that opened in 1988.

“That basic thing you learn to do as an architect applies here. We’re still doing problem solving that has to do with light, volumes, the massing of things.” But Rice learned a new, more organic way of designing from his mentor Charlie Faust, an artist, architect and 30-year zoo veteran who formerly held Rice’s job. Faust retired last year.

“Charlie taught me about artistic design, not just architecture,” Rice said. “The only way I could describe it is he showed me a painterly way of seeing things, not just massing.”

This more organic approach to landscape composition, the use of foreground, middleground and background spaces, the integration of people, plants and animals, has made the zoo a much more polished piece of design. For that, Rice gets much of the credit.