Duke Expands Facilities for Endangered Lemurs

DURHAM, N.C. — Since the 1970s, the world-renowned Duke Lemur Center at Duke University has provided a dwelling place for a colony of 140 diurnal lemurs now endangered and residing at the refuge. As part of a $10.4 million project, architects Lord, Aeck & Sargent were tasked with creating two new permanent, winterized facilities to replace the operational, yet outdated and undersized facility.

 

“To update and expand our facilities, we wanted an attractive, sustainable design that would be flexible, functional and efficient both for cleaning and for shifting animals from one part of the buildings to another when they’re sick or being used for observational research,” said Anne Yoder, DLC director. “The Lord, Aeck & Sargent team designed two professional-looking facilities that have balanced all of our aspirations. The buildings have made a great difference to our functionality and have improved life for the lemurs and the staff.”

 

For decades, the DLC has been home to the largest colony of lemurs outside of their native home of Madagascar. Lord, Aeck & Sargent began working with the DLC in 2006 to custom-design a place for functional, efficient and non-invasive research of the lemurs and other prosimians.

 

“When we began working with the DLC staff, we learned how inefficient and time-intensive it was for the keepers to feed, care and clean up after the lemurs,” said Lauren Rockart, a Lord, Aeck & Sargent senior associate who served as project manager for the DLC buildings. “The new buildings needed to streamline these activities, so we designed both with animal housing wings radiating from a central core area that houses common resources.”

 

Lord, Aeck & Sargent designed a single-story, heated facility comprised of two buildings. The Releasable Building is now home to 60 lemurs allowed to free-range when weather permits. It also includes a dry laboratory used by DLC researchers to record their observations of the free-ranging lemurs.

 

The second building, a Semi-Releasable Building, houses a mix of 80 geriatric and other lemurs who have limited free-ranging capacity for physical, behavioral or social reasons. The Semi-Releasable Building has a wet lab with a fume hood, chemical storage and ventilation to support biological and chemical analysis. The Semi-Releasable Building’s core also houses two hibernation rooms currently being used to study hibernation in the DLC’s dwarf lemur population.

 

According to Lord, Aeck & Sargent, each lemur is provided a housing module with 50 square feet of interior space attached to 100 square feet of fenced exterior space via a sliding door that opens whenever the temperature is 50 degrees or higher. There are multiple ways to house groups of lemurs and interesting ways for them to open and close doors to create different pathways from one housing module to another.

 

The housing modules are grouped into various sized suites serviced by a double-loaded corridor. This arrangement allows DLC staff to isolate an area from other building spaces to control the spread of disease to or from a suite. Housing unit exterior ceilings and most walls are constructed of vinyl-coated welded wire mesh capable of withstanding repeated cleaning and sanitizing procedures. Some of the walls, however, are solid because some lemur groups don’t always co-exist together well.

 

“Before the expansion, animals ranging in the woods had to be caught up and encaged in heating enclosures in the winter, which compromised the natural habitat needed for research.” said Rockart. “The new housing facilities feel very generous and have great room for animals to occupy, partially because of the windows in the animals wing. Stacked 12” x 12” glass blocks have been randomly inserted and make the enclosures feel bright and sunny.”

 

The housing layout facilitates easy feeding, cleaning and maintenance. Housing modules include human-sized interior module mesh doors with human-only latch operation. There are also keeper runs in each exterior area with similar entries for humans.

 

Typically, animal-housing facilities require a need to be washed on the inside only, but the DLC required the need to be washable on the inside, as well as the outside. Architects coated the 44 feet long by 10 feet high interior with epoxy paint and a concrete sealer on the exterior for easy cleaning.

 

Center researchers found it important to build the center with LEED certification in mind, an important feature of the design for Duke University.

The fenced-in, 69-acre Duke Forest is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. In keeping with the lemurs’ native environment found only in Madagascar, designers incorporated native species of trees, plants and bamboos into the habitat design, such as FSC-certified wood laboratory casework and bamboo accent wall panels in the corridors.

 

Other water- and energy-saving features include the use of regional construction materials, low VOC paint sealants, an energy-efficient HVAC system, occupancy light sensors in spaces occupied by humans, bicycle racks and preferred parking for low-emission vehicles, low-flow plumbing fixtures and drought-resistant plantings.

 

But the DLC will not stop there. Master plans are in the works for improvement of research space, observation and displays.

 

“The center was a really fun project to work on. Lemurs are incredible animals and the project resulted in the design of beautiful, functional buildings for researchers to do their jobs and the community to observe and learn from the animals,” said Rockart.