This project for the Ozeanium sets out to make a representative building for the Basel Zoo, bringing its low-lying landscape of pavilions, paths and river gardens upwards at the Heuwaage in a figure that addresses the scale of the city. At the point where the river is suppressed beneath the city, the new building rises to make a proud confrontation with the broad spaces of the Heuwaage viaduct, that has the effect of tempering their banality. The vertical axis of the building extends down to vaults in the basement at the level of the river, and up to rooftop terraces with distant views.

The contents of the Ozeanium, with its extraordinary ocean environments, specialist information and scientific research, are represented here as a tall and dense body, whose interior organs are tightly held up by high walls wrapping around the building. The convex shells of the walls and the concavities at the base, make a form like an elaborate vessel, holding a mysterious content. In place of transparency or formal rhetoric, the design adopts the manners of museums of the nineteenth century, that used ornament and sculptures on the facade to announce the purpose of the institution. Here the facades are full of playful reference that speaks to the passer-by about the  unusual nature of the Ozeanium. The facade is clad with a fine network of precast pieces whose pattern of scales integrates small perforations and larger screens, filtering daylight to the interior. The scalloped profile of its top, its external chambers and arcades at the base, along with its mosaics and fountains, make some reference to the architecture of baroque gardens, where forms of nature, water and planting are drawn together into environments of wonderful fantasy.

The interior spaces of the Ozeanium are mysterious and formally varied, drawing the scenography of the pools, rock cavities and luxurious conservatories closely together with an interior architecture. An unusual range of atmospheres amplifies the breadth and spectacle of the marine environments, spaces that are grand and others that are intimate and strange, spaces that are brutal in their directness and others whose extent is not easily perceived.