Work on building at Heifer site starts
Posted on Monday, March 10, 2008
Nearly a year after the groundbreaking for Heifer International’s education center, construction crews have begun to lay the building’s foundation and are on target for a grand opening in June 2009.
The $ 7. 5 million Polly Murphy & Christoph Keller Jr. Education Center will be 16, 000 square feet and include an exhibit hall, gift shop, cafe and conference rooms.
“Having an education building is really going to open the door for the public to come and have an experience — a deep experience we hope — of learning about the solutions to these very serious problems of world hunger and poverty,” Heifer spokesman Ray White said.
The 64-year-old hunger relief charity, based in Arkansas since 1971, provides animals such as alpacas, water buffalo, rabbits and bees to families in underdeveloped countries and in more than 25 U. S. states. Heifer trains recipients to care for the animals, use them to improve the lives of their tenders and pass the animals’ offspring to others.
Construction of the education building is the second phase in a three-phase project that began with Heifer’s $ 17. 5 million world headquarters building. That building opened in March 2006 next to the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.
The cost of phase two, including the Murphy Keller Education Center, nearby wetlands and a green space is $ 13. 5 million. The charity has raised about $ 8. 5 million so far, leaving them to raise $ 5 million to complete the project, White said.
The final phase will be a global village, which will include a collection of interactive exhibits depicting villages from Ecuador, Guatemala, Cameroon, South Africa, Indonesia, China, India and Romania. Visitors will wander through the villages and learn how families from around the world achieve self-reliance through farming.
“It is not a depressing story, it’s an uplifting story,” White said. “We actually have technologically, and in many other ways, come to the point where we can see an end to world hunger.” Heifer officials have estimated the global village will eventually draw more than 250, 000 visitors annually.
The education center, named after longtime Heifer supporters Polly Murphy Keller Winter and her late husband Christoph Keller Jr., will help fulfill one of Heifer’s primary missions — to teach the American public about the root causes of hunger and solicit their support in helping to stop it, he said.
The family of Keller Winter and Keller donated $ 3. 5 million to Heifer in 2005.
As designed, the building will arc around a common lawn area and will help complete a circular design started by the curve of the headquarters building, said project designer Reese Rowland with the Little Rock architectural firm of Polk, Stanley, Rowland, Curzon and Porter Architects.
“The inspiration of the building is really a continuation of that larger circle of life idea that we set up for the entire plan for the campus,” Rowland said.
The design is influenced by the “Heifer story,” he said.
“When they give an animal to a family and they pass that animal off to the next family... it just creates these concentric rings of influence throughout a village and throughout a countryside,” Rowland said. “We set up the entire master plan for their campus based on concentric rings from that idea.” The building is designed as a pavilion space, with the roof supported off of a curved concrete wall. It will eventually serve as the “gateway to the global village,” so it is being constructed with the idea of a railroad terminal in mind, he said.
“It is the terminal building where in the future, people will buy their ticket to the world,” Rowland said.
The grounds of the new building will also contain a sustainable farming exhibit, which will showcase various agricultural methods Heifer encourages across the globe, as well as a wetlands area.
The wetlands, which will recreate a tupelo marshland, will capture storm-water runoff, facilities director Erik Swindle said.
“The water that we collect we use as irrigation for trees, and it’s a natural filtration system,” Swindle said.
The wetlands and the building are part of the environmentally conscious design Heifer has used in all of its recent construction.
The headquarters building has achieved a platinum certification in the U. S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, a standard for environmentally friendly construction, White said. The education building will be built according to Green Globes standards, a separate standardization for environmentally friendly construction, he said.
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