Visitor Center
Built in 2004, the 36,000 sq ft (3,300 m2) Visitor Center is a wide-open portal to launch visitors into the Arboretum’s 1,700-acre (6.9 km2) outdoor museum of trees. Designed by David Woodhouse Architects, its major elements are arranged to shape “inside-out/outside-in” spaces that take advantage of varied views of the Arboretum’s horticultural collections. “Gateway buildings are a specialty, and this one, which shelters an information center, restaurant, gift shop and lecture hall, follows his custom of slipping smaller structures under a dramatic roof element.” The building’s design includes wood representing the Arboretum’s collections and incorporates sustainable features such as permeable pavers in the parking lots and local fieldstone salvaged from a predecessor building.
Read more about this topic: Morton Arboretum
Famous quotes containing the words visitor and/or center:
“Beauty is ever to the lonely mind
A shadow fleeting; she is never plain.
She is a visitor who leaves behind
The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.”
—Robert Nathan (1894–1985)
“Actually being married seemed so crowded with unspoken rules and odd secrets and unfathomable responsibilities that it had no more occurred to her to imagine being married herself than it had to imagine driving a motorcycle or having a job. She had, however, thought about being a bride, which had more to do with being the center of attention and looking inexplicably, temporarily beautiful than it did with sharing a double bed with someone with hairy legs and a drawer full of boxer shorts.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)