This environmental education center recalls the history and culture of the immediate site while demonstrating how the built environment can contribute to restoration ecology through enhancing water, energy, and material resources.  Upon completion of a successful capital campaign, the Nalley Brown Nature Park Foundation and the City of Easley have committed to participate in the International Living Building Challenge to share these principles with a wider audience.

The building form is derived using biomimicry, a discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems, employing passive solar, natural day lighting and site-oriented ventilation strategies.

Living Building principles include realigning how people use water and to redefine ‘waste’ in the built environment, so that water is respected as a precious resource; signal a new age of design, wherein the built environment relies solely on renewable forms of energy and operates year round in a safe, pollution-free manner; and help create a materials economy that is non-toxic, ecologically regenerative, transparent and socially equitable.

[credits]:

Architectural:  Scott Johnston

Landscape Ecology: Earth Design

Renderings:  Helen Mittelstadt