The rehabilitation of a 1960s National Park Service Visitor Center provided creative and technically complex design opportunities to highlight one of the largest Jurassic era fossil beds in the world. Twisted by 50 years of expansive soils that shattered windows and bent steel, the building was carefully stabilized and re-imagined in a design that honored its iconic bird cage qualities.
- Original Visitor Center designed by Ashen and Allen [1960s] with a glass and steel structure serving as one of the original examples of a new building type for National Park Service: the Mission 66 Visitor Center
- Comprehensive rehabilitation includes technical design solution correcting long standing structural damage
- New design vision focused on user-friendly and environmentally sensitive solution
- Structure free-spans over fossil beds for unobstructed views
- Extensive daylighting, heating, cooling an glazing studies
- New glazing system “disconnected” from steel structure to mitigate heaving soils
- The irreplaceable fossil face was protected throughout construction with an elaborate system of scaffolding and fire-proof netting