Bernheim’s Visitor Center Receives EPA Award

Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest’s LEED Platinum Visitor Center is one of the three U.S. winners in the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Lifecycle Building Challenge.

The Lifecycle Building Challenge, a national Web-based competition, is sponsored by EPA, the American Institute of Architects, West Coast Green, the Collaborative for High Performance Schools, and StopWaste.Org.  The announcement was made October 7, 2009.

The Visitor Center was submitted by William McDonough + Partners, the creative architectural team that, in cooperation with Barnet Bagley architects, designed the Bernheim building.

“The Bernheim Visitor Center represented a magical opportunity; a chance to design a building like a tree. Imagine a building like a tree; it makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, purifies water, builds soil, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates micro climates and changes colors with the seasons,” stated William McDonough. “The Bernheim Visitor Center can do all this and more.  If a building could be alive it would be this building.”

To learn more about the competition and McDonough:
http://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/pubs/lbc3.html#winners
http://www.mcdonoughpartners.com

To learn more about Bernheim’s Visitor Center:
http://www.bernheim.org/news_recent.html