Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

A new building celebrates the site’s 100-year history with a chameleon-like steel structure that unites the garden with its urban environment.

PART ART MUSEUM, part reference library, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (BBG) today holds over 10,000 taxa of plants and receives nearly 1 million visitors from around the world each year. Although officially founded in 1910, it was only on its centennial celebration that the garden broke ground on a visitor’s center for use in welcoming them. designed by New York-based Weiss-Manfredi architecture/landscape/Urbanism and completed in the spring of 2012, the center provides a new gateway to the garden’s collec- tions with a serpentine pavilion of glass and steel that has both the structural performance to meet the site’s technical demands and the form to honor the garden’s histori- cal topography—all while providing much-needed visitor resources.