BIOS Profile
BIOS provides planning, design and construction management services to aquariums, botanical gardens, nature centers, zoos, and other natural history educational facilities. We have over 25 years of proven experience assisting you with exhibits that succeed - attracting visitation, improving specimen care and making your staff more efficient.
Complex exhibit projects require both a singular vision and the coordinated skills of many experts. We can help - from project management, concepts, and themes, through detailing, materials, costing and construction, BIOS can produce projects that combine real education, progressive animal care, exhibit research opportunities and valuable conservation action in an exciting, innovative visitor experience.
Put our experience and creative vision to work on your next project. We welcome the opportunity to work with you to achieve your dreams.
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BIOS Values
BIOS has broad experience in the design and construction of buildings and exhibits focusing on natural history and environmental education. We are one of the few design firms that specialize in such institutions. Our large body of practical experience and our connections within the museum industry and in scientific circles allow BIOS to combine knowledge of exhibitry, interpretive methods and intent, biology and operations to help the design process move along in an efficient and timely fashion.
Working closely with the Client’s Staff and other Design Professionals, BIOS’ Design Team can avoid developing projects that are difficult or expensive to build and/or operate, exhibits that are obtrusive in their use or structurally spectacular rather than informative.
We strongly believe it is critical to determine the messages the institution wants the public to learn from the exhibits early in the planning process. Then we focus on the overall visitor experience: a blend of exhibits, space planning, attention to circulation, visitor amenities and other characteristics of visitor behavior.
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Early agreement on these abstract goals plus BIOS’ understanding of the practical biology of exhibit animals will enable us to produce overall facility plans which successfully meet the education and visitor experience goals of the institution as well as the physical needs of the animals.
Sustainable design and environmental issues have always been central to our design, interpretive message and fabrication. Environmentally sensitive design is not a consideration, it is a guiding principle in everything BIOS has done and will continue to do. Natural Science and saving our Environment is what BIOS is all about.
In addition to collaborating with the Client’s staff, we encourage BIOS Staff, Consultants and Contractors to work together to come up with unique ideas and solutions that are highly functional, cost effective and aesthetically pleasing.
~W. Scott Horner
CEO/Design & Construction Principal |
