The Discovery Garden is a proposed experiential education field laboratory located along a central spine linking all of the facilities supporting WNC’s educational programming. The forms and materials of the Discovery Garden - developed using the regenerative farming techniques practiced in the surrounding working landscape - shape this intimate and accessible space while providing content for education programs.
Regenerative agriculture focuses on practices that increase soil health and facilitate carbon sequestration and the Discovery Garden highlights these ecological processes critical to healthy ecosystem function. The cyclical nature of ecosystem dynamics - decay and regrowth, plant community succession, seasonal transformations - requires a design approach that embraces evolution and change. The landscape of the Discovery Garden will be in constant flux, a living laboratory moving through time and offering visitors accessible, tactile opportunities to connect with the natural world.
Bellwether Farm • Summer Camp & Retreat Center
Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, Wakeman, OH
Project Team: AKD + GO Logic, LLC
Bellwether Farm is a youth summer camp and year-round retreat center built on a 140-acre working farm south of Cleveland, OH. Built by the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, the goals of the new facility are to integrate spiritual growth, social justice and fidelity to the environment by creating a ministry centered around sustainable farming practices. AKD’s Master Plan for the project incorporates the Client’s programming and sustainability goals into the Site Plan using principles of restoration ecology. Non-farm buildings and landscape program areas are located within an ‘Expanded Edge’, a transitional habitat zone between farm fields and woodlands.
AKD proposed an ecologically-based approach to developing the Expanded Edge. ‘The 25-year Plan’ integrates agricultural practices with managed plant community succession. As the landscape of the Expanded Edge transitions through time from crop fields and pasture, to Old Field to Shrubland, and to Woodland plant communities, the landscape forms and spatial structures that accommodate programming and circulation will be transformed as well.
Individual plant species shape space and modify experience in specific ways, and the landscape spaces shaped by Old Field species will be materially and qualitatively different from those same spaces developed within a woodland. In the landscape of the Expanded Edge, the locations and experiential qualities of program spaces will change over time as each successive plant community becomes dominant.
