Laguna Gloria, located on Lake Austin, is a popular attraction for both art lovers and bird watchers. Formerly the vacation home of Clara Driscoll, it is now owned by The Contemporary Austin and is undergoing a transformation into a sculpture garden. However, such a conversion overlooks the site’s attraction as a precious crossroads of ecotomes where a variety of birds can be seen.

The Laguna Gloria Birding Center provides a formal location for the program of birding, both on the scale of the individual birder and groups that may gather to share their findings and experience. Its location on the site is at the intersection of three ecotomes: the water’s edge, the meadow, and the floodplain forest, each a different habitat. The Center addresses each with a platform bird blind, a box blind, and a passage blind, respectively. These blinds at the periphery of the building connect to a nexus of public spaces: lecture hall, library, classrooms, information and pinup space, as well as a photography darkroom.

The location of the building and its form are driven by a desire to preserve the character of the site while imparting a new logic. How can the forest and water edges imbue their characteristics in the human intervention that replaces them? The answer was the extension of the platform blind over the water and letting the forest grow into the courtyard; circulation within the Birding Center becomes an experience of crossing thresholds between different ecotomes. Circulation to and from the site was a product of another fundamental decision, to preserve and equally provide for the two existing programs. The primary entrance is an extension of the axis leading to Clara Driscoll’s former villa and becomes a ha-ha wall, protecting the habitats of birds in the meadow from human intrusion on the south side and allowing the north to be a featured sculpture area. The wall also conceals the structure from the approach until one reaches the forest and water edges, suddenly revealing the building and the crossroads of three ecotomes at once.