Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center

Honored by the NYC Design Commission with an Award for Excellence in Design in 2008 for integrating form, function, and sustainable practice, the new Visitor Center to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden establishes a visionary public interface between the City and the Garden. The landscape design integrates ecological engineering principles with a horticultural design, which is BBG’s first high-performance botanical exhibit. In close collaboration with the architectural and site engineer team, HMWhite created a landscape design solution rooted in a botanic-based stormwater management strategy. A coordinated network of resilient landscape systems that include the Center’s living roof, bio-swales, and rain-garden infiltration basins work together to absorb and cleanse the site’s most extreme seasonal rainfall runoff. These distinct landscape typologies provide a new pedagogical paradigm to demonstrate the dynamic power of landscape-based site engineering alternatives.

The Center’s landscape design incorporated more than 100 new plant species to further expand BBG’s botanic exhibit offerings. To ensure the new plantings’ robust acclimation to project conditions, the plant selection and design process included extensive research and on-site tests to verify the unique project-specific performance criteria requirements. Working within the Visitor Center’s tightly contained project limits, the integrated landscape design proves how complex site engineering and environmental requirements are solved by adapting nature’s ecological principles. This high-performance landscape design synergistically demonstrates BBG’s commitment to environmental stewardship and conservation.