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Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast » South Texas » San Ygnacio to Mission » Mission and Vicinity (Hidalgo County) » World Birding Center

World Birding Center

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2004, Lake/Flato Architects. 2800 S. Bentsen Palm Dr., Bentsen–Rio Grande Valley State Park
  • (Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )

The center celebrates the Lower Rio Grande Valley as the richest coastal migratory bird flyway in the world. Set in a twenty-five-hundred-acre park and wildlife refuge along the Rio Grande, the complex is designed as a backdrop to the landscape, with three buildings creating a set of distinctive courtyards to engage visitors with the outdoors. While its courtyard-plan concept is similar to the Laredo State Mental Health Care Facility (LA19) by the same firm, the World Birding Center takes its cues from its immediate context by using barrel-vaulted, self-supporting corrugated-metal roof shapes that recall the agricultural storage facilities widely used throughout the farming communities of the Rio Grande delta.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Mission Canal Company Second Lift Pumphouse
La Lomita Chapel and Novitiate
Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church
Rio Theater (Teatro La Paz)
Border Theater

Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "World Birding Center", [Mission, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-01-SM38.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 292-292.

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