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The flooring of a Savannah Splash Zoo

COVID-19 stopped a lot of projects around the World but also helped some architects, investors and promoters to refine their ideas, mature the plans and create innovative and magnificent projects for new leisure spaces.

The award-winning landscape architects and environmental planners at Green & Dale Associates, known for the design of several Zoologic and Aquarium exhibits had finished a brilliant job that was meant to open just at the time that COVID-19 intervened but this made the zoo staff to take the opportunity to stablish the landscaping that also integrated the Waterhole outdoor café and splash area in this project.

It is located at the city of Dubbo, 1 hour flight and about 400km from Sidney, in the Orana Region of New South Wales (commonly abbreviated as NSW), a state on the east coast of Australia and the name of this project is Taronga Western Plains Zoo.

This is a seven-kilometre zoo safari and the splash-and-play area of around 430m2, that represent a Savannah waterhole was designed with views over African herd species and sculptures of an elephant drinking and a hippo family frolicking in the water in between a landscape of architecturally designed circular timber clads and shaded seating.

Stuart Green, Principal Landscape Architect at Green & Dale selected the Polysoft products for the flooring of this wet and dry play area due to the vibrant colours and the great performance of the system when installed over concrete. It was also key to have a system capable of having a good durability to support big climatic variation common on this region microclimate. Expansion and shrinking due to temperature variations is a big challenge and a system with the appropriate tensile properties is needed, especially when a cushion layer of rubber material is used.

In Dubbo temperatures during winter can go below 0ºC at night and during the summer they can easily go at 45ºC, and this makes the cool qualities of the Polysoft system the best fit.

Some soft areas were laid over rubber around the animal structures, while the wet areas use a permeable Splash System that drains to a reservoir where the water is treated, cleaned, and returned to play, because water conservation is a priority in this drought-prone region.

The installer of the system was the company Super Surfaces, with more than 20 years of experience applying synthetic floorings and one of their employees at the time they did the job, said Polysoft system is the coolest product he had walked on in hot weather and was applied easily and flawlessly while listening the lion’s roar.