Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

This new facility accommodates research, education and visitor needs on a 40-acre site. The Center is designed as a series of outdoor spaces and facilities, including visitors' galleries, a 250 seat auditorium, classrooms. Features include a gift shop and tea room, botanical library and research labs with a focus on the education of visitors about the use of native plants and demonstrating an ecologically sensitive approach to the development of a site with fragile environmental conditions. The facilities and the program they support model "total resource conservation" while showing the beauty of native landscape. Uniting the entire complex is a rainwater capture and reuse system, the largest of its kind conceived in the United States at the time of construction. Passive solar heating, pragmatic building orientation, use of recycled and reclaimed materials, and use of excavated material, is integrated in the design.