Observatory Park is a six-acre astronomy park and complex in Great Falls, Virginia, which will include an education/museum building, a planetarium, a roll-top observatory and a sundial garden. The education building will house a lecture hall, classrooms, a library, a sundial-building workshop and a museum space for didactic displays and historical objects related to astronomy as well as the site's use during the Cold War by the Defense Mapping Agency.
Observatory Park is a six-acre astronomy park and complex in Great Falls, Virginia, which will include an education/museum building, a planetarium, a roll-top observatory and a sundial garden. The education building will house a lecture hall, classrooms, a library, a sundial-building workshop and a museum space for didactic displays and historical objects related to astronomy as well as the site’s use during the Cold War by the Defense Mapping Agency.
Located in a residential neighborhood, the building will be set into the ground to reduce its bulk and retain the park-like quality of the site. The museum building can be either entered from above, through a glass pavilion that will enclose the dome of the planetarium, or, via a ramp into a sunken courtyard. The 40,000 square foot education building is earth-sheltered on the south and west sides. The north and east elevations are gradually exposed as the park slopes down to the northeast. A green roof continues the plane of the sundial garden that covers the site. The building will include a number of sustainable design features and the landscape design will use a variety of local plants and low-maintenance field grasses.