Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center and Overlook

To provoke curiosity and interest in its world-class collection, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center provides a legible point of arrival and orientation, an interface between garden and city, culture and cultivation. The building is conceived as an inhabitable topography that defines a new threshold between the city and the constructed landscapes of the fifty-two-acre garden. Sited at Washington Avenue and within the berm that separates the Brooklyn Museum parking lot from the Botanic Garden, the Visitor Center provides clear orientation and access to the major garden precincts such as the Japanese Garden and the Cherry Esplanade. The Center includes an exhibition gallery, information lobby, orientation room, gift shop, café, and an events space.

The Robert W. Wilson Overlook creates a new destination in New York City's Brooklyn Botanic Garden with stunning views over the Cherry Esplanade and Garden at large. Encompassing 1.25 acres of the Garden's most significant unprogrammed site, north of the Cherry Esplanade, the Overlook features a new garden of flowering Crape myrtle trees and an immersive four-season planting design of ornamental grasses and perennials. The Overlook encourages visitor engagement with this world-class collection through the creation of communal gathering spaces and new vantage points. A subtly sloping switchback pathway with sculptural retaining walls enhances the Garden's circulation by connecting the top and bottom of the hillside with a newly accessible route. This network of paths, walls, and landscape extends the inhabitable topography realized in the adjacent Diane H. & Joseph S. Steinberg Visitor Center, completed by Weiss/Manfredi in 2012.