Green design in the Mt. Annan Botanic Garden

We received this story from Kennedy Associates Architects in Australia through the SketchUp Go Green! website. Read below for their story on how they used Google SketchUp for their project and watch an animated video.

The Bowden Centre is a new educational and multipurpose resource building at Mount Annan Botanic Garden, Sydney NSW. The building’s primary purpose is to provide a teaching facility for the numerous school groups who visit the garden every year -- a place to learn about the garden and Australian flora. However, the facility has also been designed to accommodate a broad range of other activities, from seminars to weddings.


The brief for the project, the first permanent building at the Botanic Garden, was to set the benchmark for future buildings on the estate and to provide a unique multi-function facility that demonstrates high standards of ecological sustainability, within a very modest budget.

This was achieved through, amongst other things, siting the new building in the location of an existing structure, recycling the steel structure and aluminum windows from the earlier building, the use of low maintenance materials, the thermal management of the building via a ground coupled, water based air conditioning system and the inclusion of a series of plywood clad, vertical wall openings that act as alternatives to conventionally glazed windows.


What prompted us to spend the time building the SketchUp model was that we were preparing a talk about the building and wanted a method to explain concepts behind the building design. We set upon using the SketchUp animations as a way of bringing these concepts to life, particularly through the use of the sectional animations. We now regularly use SketchUp animations as a presentation tool to present models built in our CAD package.



Posted by Chris Cronin, SketchUp Go Green Team

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