Marie Selby Botanical Gardens Phase Two

Phase Two completes the master plan for Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, the 15-acre bayfront campus at Mound Street and South Palm Avenue in downtown Sarasota, where Sarasota Bay meets Hudson Bayou. Sweet Sparkman Architects designed the phase, with OLIN as landscape architect, Willis A. Smith Construction as construction manager and Kimley-Horn on civil engineering. The centerpiece is a new conservatory built to put far more of Selby's living collection on public view, joined by display and exhibition houses and a learning pavilion, all wrapped into the replanted gardens Phase One began. Phase One delivered the welcome plaza, the Steere Family Plant Research Center and a rooftop solar array over structured parking, giving the campus its new front door on Mound Street. Selby is a research institution as much as a public garden, and the second phase is built around showing the science rather than storing it.