Honor Award

Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitors Center
Brooklyn

HMWhite, New York City
Client: Brooklyn Botanic Garden

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    Master Plan
    A broader landscape context was examined beyond the Visitor Center's 3-acre project area to establish a landscape master plan that demonstrates appropriateness and technical environmental and landscape design resolutions within the Garden's larger historic landscape context.
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    Image: Aaron Booher

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    Context
    ''Thanks to an extraordinary public-private partnership and an innovative design, this new Visitor Center will provide a welcoming place for people from across the street and around the globe to learn about sustainability and the Garden's remarkable collections.” MAYOR
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    Image: Albert Mecerka/ESTO

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    Design Strategy
    Sculpted water-collecting features direct, collect, filter and infiltrate stormwater runoff within the berm's woven composition of woodland, prairies and wet meadow native plantings The sculpted landscape is both artful and practical in absorbing and retaining stormwater onsite.
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    Image: Aaron Booher

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    Soil Technology
    The selection of “water wise” plant typologies required soils and their profiles to be engineered to meet each plant community's performance criteria. Water absorption and drainage capacity designs were coordinated with existing subgrades and amended salvaged insitu soils.
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    Living Roof
    The leaf-shaped living roof supports over 40,000 plants, adding the Garden's first structured landscape to its collection. The 10,000 square-foot living roof captures approximately 190,000 gallons of stormwater per year in combination with the landscape design's stormwater channels.
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    Entrance Plaza Garden
    This bioinfiltration basin emerges as a welcoming and educational garden at Washington Avenue's plaza. Stormwater is delivered via a diffuser and is spread over a distribution rill, dispersing water through the plantings and eliminating water detention facilities.
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    Image: Albert Vecerka

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    Event Plaza
    The landscape design manipulates both subtle and dramatic grade transitions to accentuate the hillside's topographic presence through pathway extensions and linkages, revealing a series of garden terraces and an event terrace with its featured rain garden.
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    Landscape / Building Infusion
    The building's meadow roof emerges as an inhabitable extension of the hillside. The site design extends the Garden's pathways above, around and through the building, enabling new plant communities to weave within the existing landscape fabric.
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    Image: Aaron Booher

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    Building/Landscape Transitions
    “The landscape design's mastery is to be found in the way it manages to assert itself by providing a legible system of organization, while allowing for certain slippages to occur (most notably, between the urban and botanical).” Periodical
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    New Meets Old
    The berm's ridge hosts a mature Ginkgo tree allée and axial path, which serves as a grand balcony overlooking the Garden's collections. Formerly a woodland ramble, the exposed hillside emerges as a new garden canvas to showcase the woodland grassland.
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    Tiered Garden Terraces
    Strengthening physical and visual connections to the Ginkgo Allée, three tiered terraces establish new viewing and social gathering opportunities-a useable slope transition, which introduces a new garden route that slips through the back of the building.
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    Image: Aaron Booher

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    Seasonal Diversity
    "Though visually stunning in all four season, the diversity of plantings at the Visitor Center have a much deeper significance than immediately the eye: they help make this urban project a place to learn about ecological design..."
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    Controlled Diversity
    "The Visitor Center is a tremendous achievement in its marriage of plant ecology and architecture, from the 10,000SF living-roof, to the 60,000 plants that the garden visitor encounters in the planted areas elsewhere on the project site" Client
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    Seasonal Character
    The landscape design's seasonal evolution allows for distinct features and subtle qualities to be brought into higher focus. Varying seasonal lighchosen plant collection.
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    Future Is Now
    “If the next century will be all about man leaning to live with nature rather than fighting to conquer it, it is buildings like this that will show the way.” Periodical
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Project Statement

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden visitor center establishes a visionary public interface between city and garden. Fusing contemporary site engineering technology with sustainable landscape and horticultural design, the landscape design marks the Garden's centennial and demonstrates the institution's commitment to environmental stewardship and conservation. As a seamless, inhabitable extension of the Garden, the building's living roof design mergers landscape and architecture, redefining physical and philosophical relationships between visitor and garden, exhibition and movement, culture and cultivation.

Project Narrative

The architecture and landscape are speaking the same language and are symbiotic, but it's more about the landscape than the building. A beautifully executed integration of architecture and landscape architecture that will only get better with time.
—2013 Professional Awards Jury

Project Purpose

Integrate the building design, living roof and 3 acre botanic garden landscape context of the Visitor Center as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's new gateway. With the building's sinuous form as an extension of the Garden's hillside, the landscape design is fused with structure. The landscape design demonstrates BBG's commitment to environmental stewardship. The integration of the site's ecological engineering and horticultural design offers a new pedagogical paradigm with BBG's first high-performance botanical exhibit.

Site Context

The Visitor Center is sited on Washington Avenue at the Garden's northeastern corner where its street orientation and 385 linear feet of winding movement into the Garden provide a sequential transitional threshold between city and nature. A 25-foot high berm functions as the Center's verdant backdrop and topographic anchor. The preservation of the berm's mature Gingko allée and axial path serve as a historic organizing landscape feature against which the building's walls and landscape's flowing plant massings are registered. The Garden's original paths are woven through the building's two levels, enabling garden views to be framed and experienced as a series of episodic events.

Role of the Entrant

Working in close collaboration with the building architect and civil engineer, the landscape architectural team integrated a biologically based stormwater management strategy as the basis for the project's resilient site and landscape design. The landscape architect led a holistic site engineering approach that established a sculpted landscape comprised of a series of landscape systems - living roof, bio-swales, bioinfiltration basins and featured rain gardens. The landscape architect engaged a soil scientist consultant to engineer and coordinate soil profiles with each landscape system for supreme performance. Integration of architectural retaining walls, tiered garden terraces and rain garden architectural components were designed and documented by the landscape architect. More than 100 project plant species were researched, specified, sourced and designed for each of the project's landscape systems and horticultural features.

Special Factors

Site Design

The relationship between the berm and the pond summarizes the 3-acre site design for the new Visitor Center: the convex and the concave; the movement and collection of water. This yin/yang approach further informs the development of a unique and sustainable architectural gateway integrated into its landscape context. The project's LEED Gold certification was achieved through the system of stormwater management components that incorporates an extensive green roof, stormwater channels, riparian plantings within bio-infiltration swales and basins and ultimately terminal rain gardens. Collectively, these features eliminate need for costly subsurface water detention facilities and establish a self-sustaining landscape design as a network of new “high-performance” landscape typologies that provide unique pedagogical exhibits for the Garden.

Stormwater Management

A comprehensive network of stormwater management elements defines a critical component of the site design. An extensive green roof, stormwater channels and planted depressions gather runoff from the berm as ephemeral water features, and mitigate its flow to bio-infiltration basins which retain on-site stormwater and encourage infiltration and ground water recharge.

Soil Reclamation

Contaminated soils in the hillside's historic fill demanded remedial action. While some contaminated soils were capped, specific soil profiles were designed to restore viable soil biology to support each diverse horticultural condition. Designed to absorb and filter pollutants, the soils of the bio-infiltration basins have improved the site's water quality. Structural soils were placed under sidewalks and within plaza paving to support adjacent rain gardens and expand volumes of stormwater capture and root growth. Distinctly engineered soil profiles were designed for each planting condition, ranging from upland planting and horticultural subsoils to lowland bio-infiltration and structural soils.

Salvaged Materials

Architectural design and topographic modifications required that some of the existing Ginkgo trees be removed. The oldest (over 100 years) and largest Gingko tree was successfully transplanted on-site, while others were harvested, milled and integrated into building interior finishes. Likewise, salvaged native black locust lumber is utilized for wooden decking and timber slab bench seating at the garden terraces and entrance plaza.

Living Roof

The landscape's central feature is the building's 10,000 SF living roof design, conceived as a seamless, inhabitable extension of the Garden. Merging landscape and architecture, the living roof redefines physical and philosophical relationships between visitor and garden, exhibition and movement, culture and cultivation. A custom garden roof assembly supporting a blend of more than 40,000 plants was developed to maximize growing medium depth within the roof's load limitations.

Horticultural Exhibit

Informed by native plant communities, the planting palette distinguishes a gradation of typologies, from upland to lowland, to establish an armature for unique high-performance botanical collections highlighting trees, shrubs and meadows that withstand and thrive through periods of drought and inundation. Collectively, the planting design establishes an iconic botanic exhibit that demonstrates the distinct role plants have in how a landscape functions and performs. This horticultural design introduced 90 new plant species and varieties to the Garden's collection. Its expansive displayed and distinct weaving and weft composition establish a new pedagogical tool that showcases native plant communities as a vital ecological system component as well as highlighting their inherent beauty and vast seasonal characteristics.

Project Resources