The Age Of Aquariums

By DANIEL S. LEVY

With its forest of steel masts, miles of cable rigging and giant, sail-shaped glass roof, the new aquarium that opened in Lisbon last week looks like a futuristic ship preparing for exploration. That's as it should be: The aquarium, the largest in Europe, is the centerpiece of Expo '98, a world's fair dedicated to "The Oceans" and timed to celebrate Vasco da Gama's historic voyage from Lisbon to India--via the Cape of Good Hope--500 years ago. But Lisbon's newest tourist attraction is also a symbol of a growing public interest in underwater zoos, especially those created by Peter Chermayeff of the Massachusetts-based architecture firm Cambridge Seven, the Columbus and Da Gama of aquarium design.

Thanks largely to Chermayeff's passion and innovative eye, big-city aquariums are more popular than ever. His sparkling creations in Boston; Baltimore, Md.; Osaka; and Chattanooga, Tenn., have revitalized stagnant waterfronts and are pulling in huge crowds. The Genoa Aquarium, created with architect Renzo Piano, is Italy's fourth most popular tourist attraction and is drawing more visitors each year than the Uffizi.

Even in such distinguished company, Lisbon's Oceans Pavilion stands out. Its titanic 1.2 million-gal. central tank and four side tanks (holding an additional 300,000 gal.) are home to 8,000 specimens of 250 species, arranged so that predators and prey seem to swim side by side. Visitors to the aquarium set off on a grand, circumnavigable tour around the world's oceans, past sharks, bluefish, wreckfish and more. Along the way they pass through naturalistic-looking coastal exhibits that represent four major littoral ecologies: rocky North Atlantic cliffs with cavorting razorbills and murres; subpolar grassy banks populated by nesting Magellanic penguins; Pacific-coast pools with a kelp forest, frolicking sea otters and flying oyster catchers; and an Indian Ocean coral reef with pygmy angelfish and giant clams.

Chermayeff, who fell in love with the sea as a child on Massachusetts' Cape Cod, is proudest of how his new aquarium lets you see distinct environments united into one, interconnected oceanic whole. Fourteen-inch-thick acrylic walls separate the habitats with their murres and penguins from the pelagic sharks, jacks and clouds of schooling mackerel. The animals seem to live alongside, yet are safely away from, the predatory ocean dwellers. "The wonderful thing is that it all starts to connect and take on a richness," says Chermayeff. Indeed, it's possible to look past puffins and otters in the foreground and see right into a tank of sharks, rays and groupers. "When you look through the acrylic window, you can lose yourself in the ocean and become involved in some connective way with these little creatures," he says. "The aquarium gives you the opportunity to gaze and dream."

--By Daniel S. Levy