Aday at the zoo used to mean peering through heavy iron bars, and walking from one concrete exhibit to another. Feeding and medical treatment was managed after hours, when the visitors had all gone home, and injured animals were probably kept well out of sight. The same was true of veterinary hospitals, where injured wildlife were patched back together, and then set free, good as new. Not quite a miracle, but the process was kept behind closed doors.

Now when we go to the zoo or vet, we want to know what’s going on. We want a hands-on experience. People bring in injured wildlife and want to follow the recovery process. Television has made us all armchair diagnosticians, pathologists and forensic scientists. Instead of protecting us from the wild animals, zoos and veterinary hospitals are there to protect the animals from us, and to teach us how to protect them. No more closed doors.

Day-to-day work at the new Minifie Nixon-designed Australian Wildlife Health Centre is deadly serious but also entertaining and informative: think somewhere between ER and the National Geographic channel.

Opened on 14 December 2006, the AWHC at Melbourne’s Healesville Sanctuary houses a complex range of veterinary services: emergency ward, hospital operating theatres, laboratory, post-mortem zones, care and recovery, rehabilitation, and safe areas for the release of recovered wildlife. Moreover, Zoos Victoria, which formed a $1 million, 5-year partnership with RACV to support the centre, envisaged a ‘New Zoo’environment for visitors to come and interact with the animals and the centre’s work. Obviously, concrete and iron cages weren’t going to cut it, so Minifie Nixon Architects put together a design for the centre as radical and diverse as the facilities it would contain.

Inspired by the traditional partnership between pure mathematics and architecture, Minifie Nixon designed the curved exterior façade using “cellular automation”: a computer process which extrapolates a pattern of coloured cells based on the shapes – such as doors and windows – that must be accommodated. On the AWHC, the effect is reminiscent of a Wonderland funhouse or a fantastic chessboard. The exterior shows a malformed bulge in its flank – the external expression of the internal apse which greets visitors from behind the reception desk. This is nothing though, when compared to the bizarre golden canopy that billows out of the centre of the building. Sweeping in taut golden curves across the top of the interior, the ‘Costa surface’ performs the duties of ceiling, walls, solar chimney heat vents, courtyard and skylights simultaneously.

Another mathematical form, the ‘Costa surface’ was discovered in 1984 as one of only four forms that can continue indefinitely without intersecting (the other three are already deeply rooted in architecture theory – the plane, the helicoid and the catenoid). This one – almost like a space-age Big Top for the fabulous animals within – dips down at the centre to form the walls of a glassenclosed central courtyard and main gallery, from which all the workings of the hospital can be observed. The rooms are arranged around this central atrium like quadrants of a spider web: visitors can look straight into an operating theatre, laboratory, emergency ward, rescue room, care and recovery ward, reintroduction area and research library (post-mortems happen behind a screen, but you can watch those too). Doctors can interact directly with those on the other side of the glass, and visitors can learn about the diagnosis and treatment of the animals being cared for.

The Minifie Nixon design is particularly intriguing for its adaptation to the original construction site. It is adjacent to Badgery Creek and surrounded by natural vegetation – perfect for the release of former patients – providing extensive grounds for landscaping and garden surrounds. The site had been identified twice, independently, as ideal for a veterinary hospital, once in 1988 and again in 2003 for the Australian Wildlife Centre project. No doubt striking golden canopies and arcing beams weren’t what everyone had in mind when the topic of ‘wildlife hospital’ was raised.

And yet Dr David Middleton, Healesville Sanctuary’s Senior Veterinarian and self-styled ‘father’ of the AWHC facility, has described the Minifie Nixon design as ‘perfect’: “This remarkable centre will showcase the relationship between wildlife health, environmental health, and human health. It gives us a special opportunity to understand more about the shared world in which we live,” he said at the launch last year. At the very least, this unique wildlife rescue centre allows us all to be part of the exhibit.+

Top. The golden ‘Costa surface’ erupts through the centre of the roof.

Second. The seemingly random pattern of light and dark masonry was created using computer-generated ‘cellular automation’.

Third. Minifie Nixon’s interior design gives effect to a radically educational approach to veterinary science: visitors in the central area are separated from the surgeries and laboratories by nothing more than a transparent glass wall.

Bottom. Inside, the arcing form acts as a dramatic focal point, skylight and ceiling in one.