Basel Zoo Antelope House

When architect Fritz Stehlin and engineer Eduard Riggenbach began building the Antelope House for Basel Zoo in 1909, a fortune in earthworks (150,000 francs) went into constructing an artificial mountain to shield animals from the busy Elsässerbahn railway. The neoclassical structure, with its imposing columns and carefully calculated sight lines, was designed with headliners in mind: giraffes, the ultimate crowd-pleasers.

The building opened July 3, 1910, with eight antelope species including Eland antelope, a striped gnu, a sable antelope, bushbucks, white-tailed gnus, sump antelope, a dwarf antelope, and four African ostriches. Respectable tenants, certainly, but not the stars the house was built for.

Basel zoologist and big-game hunter Adam David had arranged for giraffes to be transported from Sudan. They never boarded, leaving the Antelope House as a palace without its royalty: a neoclassical monument to animals that would never walk through its doors.

For decades, the building stood as a beautiful miscalculation. Antelopes grazed beneath ceilings meant for 18-foot necks. Then, in 1951, the zoo added an open metal-and-glass veranda and finally brought giraffes to Basel.

Forty-one years after the Antelope House opened, the animals it was designed for finally arrived. Sometimes architecture’s grandest intentions just need a little patience, and a mid-century renovation.