For a recently completed project—the Gwinnett Environmental and Heritage Center—the client was absolutely committed to creating a very sustainable building that could serve as a teaching tool. They trusted us to site the building, to work with them to create the best program, and then to design the most exceptional building within the parameters they established.

They didn’t give us a lot of specific direction by saying, “Make it exactly like this.” We would draw things, review it with them, and they would generally like what we had created. For this museum, we tried to create a very repetitive structural bay module that was easy to build, but offers visitors a lot of delight in seeing that repetitive element when they enter. We used the exhibits inside the building as counterpoints to the background of the building.

When visitors enter that space, you want them to feel good about what they’re seeing and experiencing. Sometimes the space is a subtle, background space; other times it is a more active space. On some of our environmental museums, we’ve designed the building as a teaching tool. In those cases, you actually want to see the systems to understand how the structure functions, what the duct work is doing, how the air is moving through the space, how light’s coming into the room, and how that all creates a more energy-efficient environment and an environmentally responsive design.