Albert Vecerka / Esto
The firm's virtuosity and elastic approach to design are on full display at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, which opens this Wednesday. A sinuously shaped structure, half-bermed into a hillside with a green roof of crew-cut grasses, the center combines architecture and landscape (plus some heavy-duty engineering) with the mobile harmony of a ballet.
Which is also to say that it doesn't photograph easily or lend itself to a single impression or "take." Seen from its Washington Avenue side, the Visitor Center presents a modestly elegant concrete-and-glass façade with a twice-pitching copper roof to blend in with other Brooklyn Botanic Garden buildings along the street, such as the rather grand McKim Mead & White Administration Building. On the parking-lot side, the Visitor Center drops any notion of formality with the curvaceous glass walls of two pavilions adjacent but not touching—like two swirling eddies—luring the visitor along a glass-covered path wending inexorably into the gardens.
The 480-foot-long larger pavilion contains orientation exhibits, offices, a catering kitchen and a leaf-shaped event space. Aerial views clarify its tadpole-like shape and the way it undulates along and merges with the hillside, while the smaller, more rectangular-shaped pavilion containing the gift shop faces the street.
The experience of strolling through the entire center is seductively baffling, and never more so than when climbing an exterior stair that runs up the larger pavilion to an overlook on the garden side. It's a climactic moment because at the entrance plaza the building seems to be a one-story structure, but from the top of the stairs you find yourself on an unexpected terrace passing under the green roof and meandering toward terraced gardens on the hilltop itself with far-flung views of the entire 52-acre garden.
When did visitor centers become such orchestrated events? Time was when a ticket-taker, turnstile and stack of brochures with maps—pretty much what greeted visitors at this spot in years past—were sufficient to the task of welcoming the uninitiated. Today's increasingly ubiquitous visitor centers serve a much more ambitious purpose: to demonstrate with instant legibility the DNA of the host institution. Architecture, graphics, program announcements, the gifts in the gift shop and even the tiles in the bathroom—here colored with pixelated plant images—must all telegraph the same core message.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, entering its second century, is hardly a novice at branding, but at the new Visitor Center it is exercised with comprehensive aplomb. On the entry plaza, even before one buys a ticket, the sustainable landscape lessons begin with two planting beds—sprouting black gum trees, wild hyacinth and water-loving grasses—that are sunk into the pavement and operate as storm-water basins channeling overflow to the nearby Japanese garden pond rather than into New York's sewer system. Similarly, the green roof (designed, as were the rain gardens and other landscape elements, by HM White) is no small engineering feat. With a pitch of up to 27 degrees, it requires complicated networks of special soils held in place with cleats and geo-nets involving drip irrigation systems woven into capillary fabrics, and other impressive techniques with specialized vocabularies known only to au courant gardeners. It almost goes without saying that such a state-of-the-landscape building is heated and cooled geothermally.
The $28 million Visitor Center is one of three entrances to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where some 725,000 people visit a year. It makes no grand architectural statement, preferring to realize in every possible detail the message and the mission of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden—even the paneling inside was harvested from a Ginko on the site. And that calls for a collaborative partnership of the highest order.
Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.
via online.wsj.com