But we didn’t, you know if you’d asked me 50 years ago, if we’d ever hired a horticulturist, I said, you know, whatever. No, but, but, but actually, you know, horticulture should be one of the first people that you hire because that makes, you know, that makes the whole… Read More
So you need a geodesic dome. And it needs to be really high. The reason we’ve got a hemisphere and not, there’s a couple of other smaller, smaller ones that are only like a one-third where they come like this, but then the roof never gets high enough that you… Read More
You can’t do shading in a desert. Well, we did do shading actually. There’s a big center portion of that that’s, that’s 50% shade and then 40% and 30%, 10%. So that in December, January, February, when the sun’s coming through, it comes through clear acrylic. In the, in June,… Read More
That hot air bubble in the desert dome gets to be 140, 150 degrees at the top. And we just blow it off. And the idea was to do a big enough hemisphere that it got, you know, that you looked up once and said, wow. And then you’ve concentrated… Read More
Why was the exhibit important?… Read More
You know, you spread out a bed of sand and plant tomato seeds and wet it down and put a plastic cover over. If the tomato seeds sprout and grow good, well, that’s good sand. But we also send it to the lab. We finally found a quarry that didn’t… Read More
And it’s set there and froze. It was wet sand and it froze. So in the first part of March, they rolled in 200, 200 ton each gondola cars full of, just two big ice, to be ice cubes frozen sand. We had one heck of a time getting those… Read More
(chuckling) What was the, who had the concept of the glaze geodesic dome, and why that?… Read More
I did from the standpoint that with the jungle, with the jungle, one of the things that, that by going to other places and you know, and as I said, I believe it really, really believe in going and doing your homework, then go into anything that’s got either anything… Read More
Let me ask a couple of very specific questions. Read More
How’d you get all that sand?… Read More
Well, (chuckling) two things, number one, that huge sand dune, you know, which is like, you know, is really not all sand. It’s on top of, of a, of an egg shape, concrete dome because down below is Kingdom of the Night, and that’s the night sky of the Louisiana… Read More
We had a board president who was an engineer, but as it turns out, we were banging our head against the wall, just struggling. I mean, he was also a donor and we were struggling with him. And finally, you know, Stan Howe, who’s been an architect for years and… Read More
Why don’t, how about us, we come back tomorrow?… Read More
You know, Ed, let’s break off right now. We’ll come back tomorrow. And cause I was waving my and arguing and whatever, and it just, we were getting nowhere. You know, and it was gonna be his money we’re going spend. And, and so I said, you know, we went… Read More
He put little green bushes on. It was the same thing we’d shown him the day before, we came back the next day. And he said, gah, that’s great. That’s what, yeah, that’s, that’s great. Let’s go. (dog barking) So it, you know, it’s, but you have to have the… Read More
You think you can raise the money. Read More
And I said, you know, why not?… Read More
And so, you know, we, we opened, we opened the Lied Jungle in April of 1992, immediately rolled into planning and designing an aquarium. The one good thing about having a long time team and span and all of the architect is that an architect that’s been working with you… Read More
And, you know, when it came time to do the gorilla valley, about 23 years later, that individual came full circle and, and signed on for gorilla valley and then for the orangs and then for the elevator, and then for the second half of our conservation center to the… Read More