The Visitor & Administration Center is the centerpiece of Queens Botanical Garden's Sustainable Landscapes and Buildings Project, Phase II of the Garden's far-reaching Master Plan. When completed in 2015, the Master Plan will have guided the Garden to the broadest fulfillment of its vision and mission to highlight the roles of plants in various cultures and promote healthier communities through environmental sustainability.
Susan Lacerte, Executive Director of Queens Botanical Garden and APGA's Board Secretary, and Jennifer Ward Souder, a landscape architect on the Garden's staff, led the planning and building initiative. A team of talented consultants and contractors led by Joan Krevlin and her colleagues at BKSK Architects designed the V&A Center and the project's other buildings and landscapes to reinforce the Garden's mission. Consider just of few of the building's advanced features. It draws 17% of its electricity from photovoltaic panels on its roof. It has no conventional furnace or air conditioner. Instead, it uses 55-degree water from an aquifer 300 feet below ground to heat and cool the interior and reduce fossil fuel consumption. Graywater from the V&A's sinks, dishwashers and shower flows to a constructed wetland where it is naturally cleaned and recycled in the building's public toilets. The horizontal wood slats on the building's exterior, called brise-soleil, shade the interior in the summer and let in light in the winter.
The auditorium's planted green roof insulates while minimizing storm water run-off, reducing the urban heat island effect, and saving wear-and-tear on the City's overburdened sewage system. The roof is planted with native species, such as little bluestem grass (Andropogon scoparius), prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis), and mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum). More than 15 plant families were used to landscape around the V&A Center, including bottlebrush sedge (Carex comosa), great bulrush (Scirpus validus), marsh fern (Thelypteris palustris) and cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis). All require less fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides to maintain.
Water is central to the V&A's design. The wing-like terrace canopy not only shades the plaza, it also collects rainwater that it pours into the cleansing biotope at the western end of the building. There, the roots of native wetland plants such as soft rush (Juncus effuses) and swordgrass (Scirpus americanus) filter and clean the water before it is pumped to the fountain at the Garden's entry plaza. The fountain feeds the watercourse that flows through the plaza, looping back to the cleansing biotope. The Garden's two bioswales, depressions in the landscape planted with native flora that can endure both dry and very wet conditions, collect rain and allow the water to slowly drain into the soil.
As a pilot project for the City of New York, the V&A Center demonstrates that there are many new technologies available to architects and planners to mitigate human impact on the environment. In fact, the building is designed to achieve the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED® platinum rating, the highest possible status. There are many old technologies to assist us as well, such as the V&A's brise-soleil, which have been used by people in tropical climates for centuries. And the building's landscaping is an eloquent appeal to use more sustainable plant species.
But the most important lesson of the V&A Center may be that people should not lose hope in the struggle to slow and ultimately reverse global climate change. Human ingenuity is a great renewable resource. If we are flexible and vigilant, solutions to our environmental problems will emerge. This same philosophy is at the heart of the Mayor's far-sighted PlaNYC proposal for the City's environment, as well.
To learn more about sustainability, Queens Botanical Garden's Master Plan, and the Sustainable Landscapes and Buildings Project, visit http://www.queensbotanical.org/
