The purpose of the Warren Skaaren Environmental Learning Center at
Westcave Preserve is to serve as a wilderness classroom in an
established preserve in Central Texas.
The building design is flexible and can accommodate large school
groups of 150+ children and normal visitor groups of 1-10 people. It
serves as an efficient classroom for the large school groups by
providing standard teaching tools such as computers, projection screens,
marker boards, tack boards, and exhibit walls while making a space
that feels like it is connected to the outdoors and open to the
surrounding preserve.
Most importantly, the building creates an awareness of the basic
environmental systems that we live within. The educational challenge of
environmental learning is to simplify the complexities of the natural
sciences and ecology to their basic components; air quality, water
quality, protection of the soil and the conservation of energy. As such,
the design of the structure was conceived as a 3 dimensional textbook, a
framework for analogies between building materials and systems and how
they mimic or model natural systems.
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