Its long front wall, for example, isn’t so different from the straight-as-an-arrow eastern bank of the manmade reservoir. “We thought this was way too powerful of a landscape to make a building that was about itself, and that it really should take more clues from the landscape of Fairmount Park,” Dingle said. It gets you to focus on wondering what treasures might be waiting behind this huge wall. For many neighbors I spoke to that feels like a long, slow hike, built in part to ensure the site would be accessible for individuals in wheelchairs. It took me 250 steps to walk up the newly planted path from its parking lot to the entry. The design team, led by Digsau and landscape firm Ground Reconsidered, used the walk uphill to the building to build up a moment of transition and suspense.
Discovery zone in philadelphia crack#
To crack the Discovery Center’s mystery, you have to take the long way up. That message is reinforced by the sense that amid all of these woods, there’s a clearing behind that wall, where the sky feels more open. It’s so opaque and solid that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was all wall and no building, but for a glass and wood box that extends up from behind the front wall, signaling that there’s something else back there. The primary street façade is a fortress-like 460-foot long wall, presenting a nearly windowless expanse to the street below, varying in height from 2 to 12 feet tall in order to hug an uneven depression carved out of the hilltop. It is quiet in the way an entrance to the Batcave might try to hide in plain sight. Gesturing toward the reservoir, he adds, “It’s about celebrating this, and what two great organizations are going to do with it. “Building in the context of one of America’s great urban parks is a significant act,” said Jules Dingle, principal of Digsau. In the Discovery Center the partners managed, on an $11 million construction budget, to deliver a dramatic architectural statement in support of an ambitious program. Since then, it went from being a popular draw for near-neighbors, to an accidental wildlife sanctuary for native and migratory birds. It stands at the edge of a long locked-away 37-acre lake, a 130-year old piece of the city’s water system that was decommissioned in the early 1970s. WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsorĭesigned by the Philadelphia-based firm Digsau, the Discovery Center is a joint venture of Audubon Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Outward Bound School.
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