Honored by the NYC Design Commission with an Award for Excellence in Design in 2008 for integration of form, function and sustainable practice, the new Visitor Center to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden establishes a visionary public interface between the City and the Garden. The landscape’s central feature is the building’s living roof design, conceived as a seamless, inhabitable extension of the Garden that merges landscape and architecture and redefines physical and philosophical relationships between visitor and garden, exhibition and movement, culture and cultivation. The landscape design integrates ecological engineering and horticultural design and offers a new pedagogical paradigm with BBG’s first high-performance botanical exhibit. HMWhite created a landscape design solution centered on a holistic biologically-based storm water management strategy. Its resilient site and landscape design is comprised of a series of landscape systems - living roof, bio-swales, infiltration basins and artful rainwater garden designs. More than 100 new plant species were researched, specified, sourced and designed for each of the project’s landscape systems and horticultural features – vastly expanding BBG’s botanic exhibit offerings. Fusing ecological engineering technology with sustainable, artistic landscape and horticultural design, this LEED Gold certified project and landscape design demonstrates this botanic institution’s commitment to environmental stewardship and conservation. HMWhite’s high performance landscape design and the project’s extensive native plant exhibit will dutifully serve the Garden’s next 100 years of public service and education.