Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitors Center

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 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.