Oct. 30, 2024 Ι Metropolis Magazine
As the front door to one of the nation’s oldest botanical gardens in continuous operation, the new Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s most important job was to get out of the way and let the 79-acre campus filled with historic architecture and some of the rarest plants on the planet “do the talking.”
Completed in 2023 and designed by Ayers Saint Gross (ASG), the center uses a minimalist material and chromatic palette: white, gray, beige, wood, brass, and limestone, with generous deployments of glass to see into the gardens beyond. A few natural textures and patterns inspired by the garden’s collection give visitors hints of what they’ll see there. “The building, in a lot of ways, is a quiet background to the new gardens,” says Glenn Neighbors, ASG principal.
The 94,000-square-foot building includes an expansive lobby, classrooms, an auditorium, a gift shop, a café, and an events center situated between gardens by Michael Vergason Landscape Architects (MVLA) at its north and south, a dramatic change from the previous visitor center, which had a paved plaza between the parking lot and the building entry. It also forced nature enthusiasts to traverse some awkward circulation, first bringing visitors eight feet below the grade of the garden.
The new entry sequence begins with Vergason’s north garden, where a monumental stair is flanked by gradual, sloping walkways on both sides that provide a scenic route through woodland species from around the world, including areas that the botanical garden’s robust global conservation mission focuses on like the Caucasus, China, and Japan, as well as the United States. “It’s a teaching landscape as well as a conservation showcase,” says Matt Sickle, senior associate at MVLA.
Underneath there are two cisterns that hold a total of 50,000 gallons, and on the roof is a solar array expected to provide nearly a third of the center’s energy needs, reinforcing its conservation ethos.
Along the north garden’s accessible paths, a “faceted system of sloped walls,” says MVLA principal Kameron Aroom, forms garden terraces. Traversing this path bordered by locally quarried Gabouri limestone, stones that powerfully evoke the Mississippi River Valley as it runs through Missouri sliced and exposed by highways and rivers, “really feels like you’re navigating a bit of the Missouri landscape,” he says.
This rusticated limestone is a tactile contrast to the smooth and refined limestone used on the north building facade, where monumental opacity with beige and cream marbling foregrounds the verdant richness of the north garden. “Having that large stone wall allows us to really focus and frame that portal into the garden itself and create that sense of gateway,” says Neighbors.
The sense of entry into a gateway is intensified by the atrium that rises above the visitor center’s low roofline. This vertical glass lantern effuses a warm glow at night, as uplighting reflects off the white fabric on the ceiling. During the day, a custom-designed aluminum scrim made from 80 panels that are two feet wide and 28 feet high filters light into the atrium in a vaguely organic pattern reminiscent of sunlight dappling through a forest canopy. Various sizes of perforations are used for loose diffusion and a tight definition of light and shadow to speckle the lobby floor with Ascent seating by Green Furniture Concept.
The custom terrazzo flooring in the lobby is the visitor center’s most affecting and subtle evocation of local botany and geology, with inlays of river rock and over 200 hand-laid, water-jet cut leaves of 12 native woodland species. The brass accents sparkle in the diffused sunlight from the atrium, and here and elsewhere, brass is deployed as a median between a glittery showpiece material and a soft organic patina that conveys the history and legacy of an organization that was founded in 1859. The café and restaurant by local architects Tao + Lee features pressed botanical specimens from the garden’s collection integrated into space dividers and custom bench and community table carved from an immense Shumard oak tree that was previously part of the garden’s living collection.
To the west, a new conservatory topped with a pitched-glass roof—a nod to the campus’s nearby 1882 Linnean House—is used as an exhibition space, bringing the gardens inside. However, in keeping with the point of the center (to pull visitors outside as efficiently and alluringly as possible), a floor-to-ceiling glass wall to the south and an axial series of garden plots organize the entry sequence into the wider landscape. This view culminates with a ginkgo tree on the axis, with the lobby used to derive the perforation pattern on the atrium scrim.
A primary job for Vergason’s firm was to use gardens and the building to clarify axial relationships across the site. Previously, visitors left the center to face a “bewildering range of choices,” says Vergason, with little visual hierarchy and looping paths that didn’t make it clear where to go and what you might see when you got there. One of the widest paths departing the visitor center deposited you back by the parking lot.
The new south axis gardens are a collection of grassland species from around the world including purple coneflower and shaggy love grass. A rectangular grid pattern traces a primary north–south axis from the visitor center to the ginkgo tree and a secondary axis from the events center to the Linnean House. Additionally, an east–west axis guided by the gardens runs from the visitor center to the new entrance to the Ottoman Garden.
The landscape, and its framing by ASG’s subtle building, aren’t just a showcase of the botanical garden’s wider offerings but a wayfinding marker and circulation guide as well, leaving you with a few signature experiences of light, texture, and organic form before speeding you on your way. “What we tried to do,” says Vergason, “was make [the] arrival to the visitor center synonymous with arrival to the gardens.”