KoalafiCation: A Ring-Shaped Rehabilitation Centre That Puts Koalas at the Core and Visitors at the Edge

Most buildings for animals are really buildings for the people who come to look at them. KoalafiCation starts from the opposite premise. It places the koala habitat at the centre of a circular plan and pushes every human programme (reception, café, museum, exhibition) out to the rim. The result reads less like a zoo and more like a protective ring: architecture that wraps around a population under threat, holding visitors at a respectful distance while still letting them see what is at stake.

The project was shortlisted in Haven 2020, a competition that asked for refuges for vulnerable wildlife. It was designed by Burak Dönmez of TOBB University of Economics and Technology and is sited at Mount Tamborine in Queensland, Australia. The brief behind the design is clear. Koalas depend on eucalyptus, and that dependence leaves them exposed to deforestation, bushfire, climate change, chlamydia and the steady fragmentation of their habitat by urban expansion. Dönmez maps these pressures and treats architecture as an active agent of recovery. Enclosure alone is not the goal.

A Walkway That Floats Above the Forest Floor

The opening render sets the project's attitude toward the ground. A pale elevated walkway passes overhead, and its tapering underside casts a soft shadow onto lawn and tree trunks. Visitors move beneath it, and a photographer crouches among the trees. The decision to lift the architecture on columns, rather than cut and fill the slope, is the most consequential move in the scheme. It leaves the landscape largely intact, lets the forest floor carry on beneath the building, and turns the built form into a light overlay rather than a footprint.

The volume is not one large mass. It is broken into smaller modules strung along a circulation axis that follows the site's contours. Modules sit at different levels to match the terrain, and this produces a shifting sectional relationship between building and ground. Fragmenting a programme to fit a topography is a familiar tactic. Here it carries extra weight, because every metre of untouched ground is potential habitat.

The Picture Window as a Conservation Tool

Inside, the experience slows down. A low circular platform faces a wide picture window, and silhouetted figures sit and stand in soft daylight, looking out into the trees. The room offers no glass tunnel and no animal pressed against a barrier, only a framed view of the canopy. This restraint fits the project's stated aim of observation without disturbance. Visitors follow controlled loops between curated viewpoints instead of roaming freely, and the platform's circular form repeats the logic of the plan at the scale of a single room.

Glass Galleries Lifted Into the Canopy

The exterior render shows one of the modules as a glass-walled gallery perched on slender columns above a sunlit clearing, with koala posters visible through the glazing and tree shadows falling across the pale ground below. The companion interior reverses the view. Floor-to-ceiling glazing with thin mullions looks out toward the treetops, with a curved ramp and low white buildings in the middle distance under a cloudy sky.

Taken together, the two images show how elevation does double duty. Raising the galleries protects the terrain, and it also places visitors closer to canopy height, the zone where koalas actually live. Large glazed surfaces and open viewing corridors give an immersive outlook while the building itself remains the boundary. The curved ramp glimpsed in the second image hints at the continuous loop that ties the modules together, so movement between them stays slow and predictable instead of abrupt.

An Exhibition That Teaches Before It Shows

The exhibition room is the most conventional space in the set, and it plays an essential role. Freestanding grey walls carry colourful koala portraits, visitors walk, sit and pause between them, and green light filters in from outside. Dönmez treats education as part of the conservation infrastructure. Visitors meet the koala first as an image and a story, in a space well away from the animals, before they are led toward the more sensitive viewing points. Awareness is built into the route, so the spatial sequence carries the message and the signage only supports it.

Reading the Ring: Hospital, Museum and Habitat in One Loop

The axonometric plan makes the whole strategy legible. A ring-shaped rehabilitation centre wraps the site, with circled callouts for reception, café, hospital, storage, museum and exhibition spaces arranged around its circumference. The rehabilitation centre is a hybrid typology that places medical infrastructure alongside public and educational programmes on a single continuous loop. Keeping the hospital inside that loop, instead of hiding it in a separate back-of-house block, keeps rehabilitation visible as the project's purpose. The circulation, meanwhile, ensures that human activity stays controlled and secondary.

The circular system is also framed as phased, with three progressive stages that let the centre adapt as ecological needs change. That is a sensible instinct for a building tied to a living population whose numbers and health will fluctuate. A ring has no fixed end, so it can absorb new modules without losing its organising logic.

Why This Project Matters

KoalafiCation is persuasive because its central idea is spatial and not merely rhetorical. Many wildlife proposals say they put animals first. This one draws that claim as a plan, with habitat at the core, people on the periphery, and a loop that controls how close anyone gets. Lifting the modules on columns over Mount Tamborine's terrain follows the same reasoning. The ground is treated as habitat to be preserved, not a site to be levelled.

The renders show that this ethic can still produce generous, calm spaces for visitors: galleries at canopy height, framed views, an exhibition that teaches before it shows. For a student entry, that balance between ecological restraint and human experience is the real achievement. It suggests that conservation architecture can earn public support by giving visitors a carefully choreographed glimpse of the animals while leaving the animals undisturbed.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Burak Dönmez

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Project credits: KoalafiCation by Burak Dönmez Haven 2020 (uni.xyz).