General Design Category

Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center - HONOR AWARD
Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects

Project Description:
This project is about trees, water and respect. As an education facility focused on the study of wetland ecosystems, this LEED Gold Center teaches by design and example, immersing students in a thriving wetland, while exhibiting principles and techniques that help keep it intact.

A wetland acts as a filter to everything that enters it from uphill, with many vessels to carry water and nutrients. By creating a place that respects these factors, the Center is integrated with the wetland organism, as part of the system rather than apart from it.

Preserving the existing tree canopy meant building footprints of no more than 2,500 square feet. By analyzing voids in the forest, the design team identified "rooms" for each of eight structures, four of which barely touch the site. Using pervious systems; gabion walls and absorbent concrete, the terraced land forms allow water, air, and vegetation to flow unimpeded toward the wetland, thus sustaining the fragile, sloped site. Building volumes, decks, and plazas are staggered, offset and pierced to accommodate existing trees, allow the center to interact with its surroundings, and to frame views across the Mercer Slough Wetland to the City of Bellevue skyline.

The landscape architecture and buildings are truly reciprocal. The center provides a seamless transition, with a plaza merging to decks that pass below extensive roof overhangs and arbors toward an overlook cantilevered high above the Slough. Large sliding doors and floor to ceiling windows promote an indoor/outdoor, treehouse feeling for all but the two land-bound buildings. Through a series of weirs, the landscape unfolds on its way down the hillslope to extend toward and through the shed-formed buildings. Sloped walkways reveal benches and seatwalls for gathering and observation with decks protruding out into the forest understory as overlooks and outdoor classrooms.

What is the value of seeing eye-to-eye with a Pileated Woodpecker? What is it worth to design education centers so that, in 15 or 20 years, the water, bugs and birds don't know they are there? Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center is a place to explore these questions.

Jury Comments:
This project wins an Honor Award on the basis of the good balance achieved between landscape and architecture, a rare occurrence. Both landscape and architecture are simple and elegant without frivolous and capricious decorations. They set up as the main action the display of the landscape. The materials used are plain and appropriate to the site. Breaking down the footprint of the Environmental Center into small units or "rooms" has fused the built parts into the slope and into the existing woods with great delicacy, teaching in the process good environmental lessons. The jury was unanimous in evaluating this overall as a very good project which achieves a high level of integrated design.