Castle completed a $1.9 million earthwork and site utilities scope for construction of the $90 million, 104,000-square-foot Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, Mo. The need for a new visitor center with enhanced accessibility for individuals with disabilities and a space with a more robust occupancy capacity significantly motivated the Garden’s decision to invest in the new LEED Gold facility.

Our project teams divided their scope into three phases, ensuring the integrity of adjacent botanical life and ensuring that part of the previous visitor center was always open and safely functional. Castle’s phase-one scope included 3,000 linear feet of excavation, trenching, and backfill between electrical rooms, existing structures, and other areas of the Garden, supporting future tie-ins as well as manhole, conduit, and additional underground electrical installations.  

Phases two and three introduced additional excavation and backfill for more than 4,000 linear feet of sanitary and sewer lines, as well as geotextile filter fabric and clean rock installation for approximately 1,000 linear feet of drain lines.  

During phase two, Castle also installed two 25,000-gallon stormwater detention tanks for a new subterranean rainwater collection system, designed to reuse rainwater for plant-life irrigation. Each concrete tank consisted of two precast sections, enabling an efficient installation process and accommodating maximum holding capabilities within the structures’ condensed footprints. Castle’s scope during this stage included trench sloping and excavation of the pit for the detention tanks, setting all precast sections, wrapping both structures with geotextile fabric, installing pipe, and backfilling the area to complete the installation.  

Since its grand opening in 2022, the Jack C. Taylor Visitor Center continues accommodating more than a million guests yearly, fulfilling its mission to enrich and preserve life by discovering and providing accessible knowledge of plants and their environments.