Over the past few months, Messenger and Facebook Open Arts have been working with an incredible group of artists from around the world to curate custom 360 backgrounds for Messenger Rooms and video calling. We’re thrilled to be able to continue collaborating with these innovators and to be a part of the creativity they bring to their communities.
The fifth artist in our series is Ralph Pugay , a Portland-based Filipino-American visual artist who paints and draws bizarre fantasy worlds that question cultural norms and ideas. For this series, Ralph created Morning Yoga at the Tropical Retreat , which was inspired by human body movement and the isolation caused by the pandemic. With this 360 background, Ralph hopes to encourage people to pay closer attention to their bodies and to be more compassionate with one another.
Having moved to America from the Philippines at a young age, Ralph has always been aware of the complexity of life and the experiences that shape him. Through his art he conveys that not everything is as simple as it seems. “I love being in a field where slowing down, observing, and feeling through while thinking through is supported, ” says Ralph. “I like making space for everything I have absorbed through my life to make it into the world I am creating.”
Spreading Our Wings
With Ralph’s 360 background for Messenger, he channeled his own feelings about the pandemic into the artistic process, which involved drawing his images on a digital tablet to render the background. “I created a 3D environment where people are ecstatically moving in space, amidst one another, ” says Ralph. “It felt like something that I wanted, given the constraints of the pandemic.”
Facebook Open Arts is thrilled to be able to spotlight artists from different backgrounds whose creative energy and innovative artistic processes inspire their communities.
“Ralph used this collaborative project to create something both personal and universal, ” says Open Arts Curator Tamar Benzikry. “The yoga poses in a tropical setting that reminded him of the Philippines also carried significance relating to COVID-19. We’re happy to see Ralph’s originality come to life in this digital setting.”
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To access Ralph’s background, simply start a video call in Messenger or create a Messenger Room on Facebook or Messenger. Tap the effects icon on your self view then select “backgrounds” to access Ralph’s background.
Facebook Open Arts empowers community through creativity. As a company dedicated to bringing people closer together, Facebook recognizes that creativity is essential to our collective wellbeing. Within our walls and around the globe, Facebook Open Arts cultivates creative engagements that offer new ways of thinking about ourselves, our communities, and the world at large. Learn more at fb.com/facebookopenarts and follow us on Instagram at @FacebookOpenArts.
To help personalize content, tailor and measure ads and provide a safer experience, we use cookies. By clicking or navigating the site, you agree to allow our collection of information on and off Facebook through cookies. Learn more, including about available controls: Cookies PolicyThe architecture of zoos has come a long way from its barbaric beginnings. But, says our critic, not even mirrored pods and sci-fi islands can shake the feeling that these are relics from a bygone age
Seattle Asian Art Museum Archives
M onkeys swinging through assault courses, tigers prowling along caged walkways in the sky, polar bears taking centre stage in a giant copy of a Yukon harbour as crowds look on from a simulated boat deck – the architecture of zoos seems to have come a long way since the king of England first locked a bunch of lions in the Tower of London and charged the public a few hand-hammered pennies to see them. But has it left the 13th century far enough behind? The Tower of London’s grim menagerie, which entertained paying punters for an astonishing 600 years, came into being after Henry III received three lions as a gift from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1235. They were meant to be a living embodiment of the royal arms of England, and the tower seemed a suitably fortified place to put them. Over the years, the royal collection grew to include elephants, rhinos, hyenas and a polar bear from Norway that was kept on a leash so long that it could catch fish from the Thames. It lasted until the Zoological Society of London was established in 1826, and the animals moved to the slightly more humane surrounds of London zoo in Regent’s Park.
With the birth of the modern zoo came the dawn of zoo architecture, spawning a peculiar kind of building that had to combine the roles of prison, theatre and museum. Over the years, there have been elaborate Sumatran temples for tigers, aviaries for exotic birds with all-but-invisible nets, and a range of equally eye-catching attempts to break down the barrier between human and animal. It’s a rich, strange history that has gone mostly undocumented – until now.
“I was amazed by how little literature and discussion there has been, ” says Natascha Meuser, author of a weighty new tome, Zoo Buildings: Construction and Design Manual. Meuser, an architect and professor, aims to redress this balance and provide guidance for future zoos. She began researching the topic a decade ago, when a toy manufacturer asked her to design some typical zoo structures to go with its animal figures, a task less straightforward than she imagined.
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“There wasn’t a simple answer, ” she says. “But I became fascinated by how the architecture of zoos reflected man’s changing relationship with animals: going from a sense of exoticism and wonder, to better hygiene and animal welfare, to the idea that the architecture should disappear altogether.”
Her book traces the origins of the zoo, from the villas of Roman senators, whose copious estates featured banqueting pavilions where guests could dine in safety while surrounded by wild beasts, to the bear pits and stag trenches of the middle ages, to the lavish royal menageries of the baroque era. None surpassed Louis XIV’s at Versailles, designed as a radial complex of enclosures with the king’s pavilion at the centre, reflecting his notion of himself as master of the natural world.
The focus shifted from entertainment to scientific study in the 19th century, with the emergence of zoological gardens in Europe. Creatures were housed in exotically styled pavilions, in the manner of a world’s fair, cementing the zoo as part of the colonial project – often complete with indigenous humans transported from their homelands to be displayed alongside the animals.
National Arts Festival
Berlin took things to a different level: its zoo was transformed into an architectural theme park, with elephants housed in a Hindu temple, antelopes in a Moorish palace and ostriches reached through a momentous Egyptian portal, every detail conceived as part of the total work of art. As Ludwig Heck, the zoo’s pro-Nazi director, put it: “Nothing is so negligible that it can’t be artistically transformed.” This thought extended to the thatched-roof huts of his barbaric human enclosures.
A backlash against themed pavilions led to a more naturalistic approach, switching the focus from anatomical spectacle to natural behaviour. The wild animal trader and circus impresario Carl Hagenbeck emerges as the godfather of the modern zoo, the first to propose enclosures without bars, realising his “panorama zoo” concept in Stellingen, near Hamburg, in 1907. He conducted tests on exactly how high each predator could jump (by tying a stuffed pigeon to a branch three metres up) and displayed them accordingly.
His zoo involved supposedly natural landscapes, separated from visitors by sunken trenches, moats and landscaped berms. The viewer assumed the role of Adam in the Garden of Eden, with mouflon and ibexes on artificial mountains, steppe animals on wide open ranges, and big cats in ravines without bars. An enthusiastic Thomas Edison visited in 1911. “The animals are not in a cage, ” wrote the scientist gleefully in the guestbook. “They are on a stage!”
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Taking a similar approach, French zoologist Gustave Loisel proposed a plan for a zoo in 1908 in which visitors would be hidden beneath an enormous landscaped hill, with the animals roaming above. People would make their way through a network of tunnels inside his artificial mound, all the way into the most intimate parts of the enclosures, getting an up-close glimpse of the animals – who, in theory, would be unaware of the subterranean voyeurs. “Nothing has really changed in zoo architecture since then, ” says Meuser. “The ultimate goal is still for the people to be invisible and the animals to have a sense of freedom.”
More than a century later, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels recycled Loisel’s proposal, creating a grand plan for a “Zootopia” in Jutland. Unveiled in 2014 with characteristic chutzpah, the proposal was presented as a radical new zoo concept, where the animals would roam free and humans would be swept beneath a landscaped carpet. As the Guardian put it: “Cage-free zoo will put humans in captivity.” Visitors would be able to spy on creatures from hidden dens inside log piles, or trundle around enclosures in mirrored pods.
Ingels recently completed a £20m panda enclosure for Copenhagen zoo, based
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