"Global Flora builds on the rich history of botanical education and research at Wellesley College established in the 1920s by Dr. Margaret Ferguson, who advocated for interdisciplinary botanical education as a Center for the College’s intellectual life. The new space will be an amazing platform for student engagement with nature and with the systems thinking that underpins progress in sustainability.”
Kristina Jones, Ph.D.
The architecture integrates innovative passive and active sustainable systems to meet the Net Zero Water criteria of the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous contemporary criteria for measuring sustainable design.
The elegant, curved form of the Global Flora Conservatory follows the east-west arc of the sun to maximize solar heat gain in winter which is captured through the thermal mass of a wall. In summer, the architecture’s environmentally responsive ETFE skin allows the biomes to be cooled entirely through natural ventilation.
“The Global Flora project is the first contemporary Conservatory that is designed in vertical section. The need to accommodate different tree heights produces a dynamic and varying interior space which works together with the configured ground of the site’s topography. This offers diverse spatial experiences of plant form that are slowly revealed as people move through the biomes.”
Architect Sheila Kennedy, FAIA, a Principal of KVA Matx.
Public education and scientific research in the Global Flora project are enhanced by an Interactive Sensor Platform integrated into the Conservatory design that provides real-time air, water, soil, and energy data, expanding knowledge of natural and architectural systems and public access to the collection for on-site and online users around the world.
The Global Flora Project has been winner of the 2021 Architizer A+ Awards for Architecture + New Technology and won the Lafarge Holcim Design Award.
