Robert Shumaker has devoted 20 years of his life to a relationship with Azy and Indah, a pair of orangutans due to arrive at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary this summer. He knows their behavioral patterns and personality traits, their likes and dislikes. So when architects began designing Azy’s and Indah’s future home, it was as important to hear from Shumaker, a respected researcher who left a prestigious job at the Smithsonian National Zoo to join the IPLS, as it was to get advice from structural engineers.

The architects from the Omaha-based Leo A Dalyfirm and the team IPLS founder Ted Townsend put together to lead the scientific focus of the project already had heard from some of the nation’s foremost experts in “green design,” a term used to describe techniques that maximize conservation and environmental sustainability. They’d already decided the IPLS complex, which reclaims what project director Kirk Brocker calls “an overgrown, tick-infested river forest … that would have been difficult to use for anything else,” would be a marriage of science and conservation. What Shumaker and other researchers brought to the design collaboration was an imperative to create a sense of place for Azy, Indah and other great apes that will be calling the 137-acre tract of land in Des Moines’ Southeast Bottoms home.

Some zoos do a good job of replicating the natural habitat of the primates they keep in captivity, Shumaker said, but don’t necessarily consider the specific needs of different classes of great apes – bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas, as well as the orangutans that have been the focus of Shumaker’s research since 1995. A familiar habitat is important, “but they have to have a superior mental environment as well,” he said.   “That’s the creative challenge. Great apes in captivity need mental stimulation. They crave it, and they deserve it on a daily basis. They can’t be healthy without it.”

The different species of great apes have distinct traits that make, for instance, an orangutan’s home unsatisfactory for a bonobo. “They all have different social needs, and that has to be reflected in the architecture,” Shumaker said. “Orangutans enjoy being separate from each other, although they need to be social. Bonobos need constant socialization relative to the orangutans.”

There were practical considerations as well. The building material had to be durable enough to stand up under daily pressure washing. The structures would have to be solid enough to withstand primates’ brute strength and innate curiosity. The orangutans’ eight-foot arm-span dictated that perches and other structures be placed to offer the animals maximum freedom of movement. Computers allowing the apes — the keenly intelligent bonobos in particular — to interact with researchers would have to be accessible, yet protected. Safety for both the apes and humans was imperative.

“Those of us who were new to a design of this type of facility were surprised at their power, strength and how clever the animals are,” Brocker said. “We have great respect for these animals – great respect. This is their home. We are providing a home for them.”

The cognitive research to be conducted at the IPLS will be non-invasive and voluntary on the part of the primates, an approach the design reflects. “Our partnership with the apes is quite unique, and we do regard them as partners,” Shumaker said. “Everything we do has to please them and be acceptable.”

Knowing that was key to the architects. “If we know what’s supposed to happen, we can design it to work that way,” said Mark Chalkley, an architect with Leo A Daly. “This required a new way of thinking. Most of the buildings we design are for human beings, and we had to learn the language and requirements of working with unique animals.”

One of the philosophical challenges for the architects was how to best convey the high esteem for great apes within a larger, worldlier perspective of the conservation ethic. One of businessman Townsend’s goals is to use the project as a springboard for discussion on the plight of great apes, endangered species whose habitat is being destroyed for building materials. He not only didn’t want to destroy habitat in his project, located on the site of an abandoned sand and gravel quarry. He wanted to leave the land in better shape than it was when the city of Des Moines donated it for the project.

The result will be a sanctuary not only for great apes, but also for threatened, endangered and historical plant and animal life in Iowa. The over-arcing message: Conservation, education, stewardship and sustainability begin at home.

The project, Townsend has said, “will deliver an honorable home for primates and set standards for conservation efforts worldwide. Through preservation, research and education, we will offer the world the experience of a new reality.”

“It’s not just about great apes,” Brocker said. “How do you get people to think about local conservation, changing the way they think about it with respect to great apes? With their plight and struggle, there’s a wonderful opportunity, and we need Iowans to make that leap with us.”

The project is in a perpetual state of evolution, though all future designs will incorporate the green elements such as temperature controlled radiated floors, a heating and cooling system that draws cool water from lakes in the summer and warm water in the winter, and restored wetlands for waste disposal.

Townsend put up the $10 million for construction of the first phase of the project, which includes a 13,000-square foot cylindrical building for the eight bonobos researchers will bring to Des Moines from Georgia State University this fall, and a smaller, 1,600-square-foot building that will be the new home for Azy and Indah, The orangutans will be housed temporarily in a multi-purpose building also under construction.

Though constantly challenged to view the project through the eyes of apes, a one-of-a-kind request from a client, the architects recognize its significance in their careers. “We can design 10 office buildings and they’re all going to blur together,” Chalkley said. “This is a milestone project in all our careers.”

That sense of being involved in something unique and noteworthy extends to the construction site as well, said Mike Carroll, the construction manager for Johnston-based Hansen Co. Inc. “We frankly tout ourselves as the only construction firm in Iowa that has experience in building great-ape facilities,” he joked.

The IPLS complex, which will be the largest and most sophisticated of its kind in North America, could quickly become a prototype for similar facilities worldwide as more attention is placed on preserving great apes.

“I’ve been doing research on primates in captivity for 35 years, and this will be the only building designed from the beginning to accommodate that research,” said Benjamin Beck, the IPLS’s conservation director. “Others are retrofitted with the research protocol, but this facility is turning that process around.”

The scientists and architects involved in the IPLS project have come together in a “dream team” of sorts that would be difficult to replicate, Shumaker said.

“One of the pities is, if you find out about a facility similar that really works well, the people who get together to create it almost never … come together again.”