ABSTRACT
In 1935, Aldo Leopold purchased an abandoned farm north of the family’s home in Madison, where Leopold was the nation’s first professor of wildlife ecology. When transitioning from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, nonchalantly leapfrogging the twentieth, the Leopold Legacy Center stands out as a symbol of how sustainable building design for the future is firmly rooted in lessons of the past. The Legacy Center was built as a cluster of buildings defining a landscaped area which in turn is divided into two parts: the welcome garden and the restored prairie. Electric energy produced by building integrated photovoltaic panels makes up for the energy used by the buildings after savings by design, making the Leopold Legacy Center a truly net zero energy building. A large portion of the south-facing exterior wall along the circulation space is glazed, allowing for passive solar gains in winter when sun angles are low.
