1. It goes almost without saying: Make the structure robust! Elephant loading is difficult to assess, and repair works are difficult to carry out because of the occupants. So use solid, imperishable materials.

2. Consider the building’s different flows of water carefully. Elephant keeping takes a lot of water for:

- watering the elephants (a big male can drink 100 l per day)
- washing them
- cleaning the building
- keeping the air’s moisture content high to protect the elephants’ skin
- provide water features to encourage the elephants’ natural grooming instincts

Make sure that any excess water can be drained to storage for cleaning/recycling or disposed of.

3. Make sure that technical plant equipment do not emit noise at low frequencies which may interfere with the elephants’ communication

4. When providing dust or sand floors for the elephants (which will be good for the elephants feet and provide them with natural sleeping quarters) consider how the sand can be cleaned and eventually replaced.

5. Glass and elephants are a difficult match. If a glazed window is within reach then consider to use polycarbonate or acrylic instead or add anti-vandal film to the glass – a pointy tusk on a fellow with all the time in the world for scratching is hard on any glass be it heat strengthened or toughened.

6. It’s difficult to establish an engineering design basis for the design of an elephant house. Get in contact with someone with previous experience from such work. Most likely they will be happy to share their knowledge with you!

Does it make a difference to design a building when you know the users will be elephants? Yes it certainly does. It is striking to notice that almost any new engineer on the project adds an elephant to their first sketch. Even our geotech people just had to show an elephant on their borehole profiles!  

On no other job has I seen engineers react in such a way. 

And it has been like this all the way. Outreaching trunks are added to visualise the gripping range of the elephants, and trumpeting sounds have been used by the design team to express joy or surprise. 

It is most unusual that we designers are so fascinated and endeared by the users of our buildings. Even though we can not transfer the elephant house design to buildings for humans I do wonder if in some way we could find ways to transfer the focus and enthusiasm. To some extend does the focus stem from the fact that an elephant house is in no way a copy-paste project. It is a continuous learning process where the majority of the building will have to be designed from scratch without recourse to earlier experience.

In a globalised economy we do not accept bottlenecks. If your local electronics dealer is out of iPods you order a new one over the internet. However, the flow of construction materials does not work in this way.  

The current level of high activity in the Danish construction industry made it impossible to find a local prefab concrete element supplier when the elephant house was sent out for tender, so the main contractor proposed to order prefab concrete walls from German suppliers.  

The design team knew the pitfalls this decision would engender from previous projects, and everybody made sure that there was focus on the disparities between German and Danish practice. But it took quite a lot of work to clear up the consequences for the prefab supplier to fulfil Danish requirements and the process was host to continuous uncertainty. 

Why has the European Union not succeed in creating a transparent market for building materials?