Best Cultural/Worship: Missouri Botanical Garden Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center

Protecting delicate and rare plants and trees from around the world was one of the challenges of building the Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

The LEED Gold-certified, 91,700-sq-ft facility features 50-ft walls in its lobby and houses an event center, meeting spaces, restaurant with garden views, auditorium and conservatory. The project, which replaces the previous 1980s-era visitor center, was built to respond to the soaring number of visitors, which grew from 250,000 in 1982 to more than 1 million in 2018.

The project entailed renovation of the garden’s 2,100-sq-ft historic Linnean House, which dates from 1882 and is the oldest continuously operating public greenhouse west of the Mississippi River.

Photo by Casey Dunn

“It was more challenging to work around the trees and plants than it was the historic building,” says Phillip Lee, vice president of operations at Alberici.

The team built 25-ft to 30-ft radius protection zones around trees, including the garden’s prized Gingko trees, and downsized project equipment to protect the soil.

Garden officials “were very adamant about the size of our equipment,” Lee says. “It was about bringing in the smallest skid steer we could so we weren’t compacting the soil as we went.”

The new visitor center features 50-ft walls in the lobby, and event space and outdoor dining area.
Photo by Casey Dunn

To keep the garden functioning throughout the three years of construction, the team built a temporary visitors center with a bathroom, gift shop and grab-and-go café. “They were able to have a physical building, a conditioned space where they could bring people in during the winter and summer and do business as usual,” says Austin Davis, Alberici senior project manager.

Davis is proud of the project. “I think it’s really rewarding to know that it is something that thousands of people will visit every day, and to know that I had a small part in it is really neat,” he says.