The Wild Alabama Education Center is a multi-use teaching, gathering, operational, and office space designed to further Wild Alabama’s mission and embody its core values. It aims to enhance Wild Alabama’s operational capacity by providing the most useful and appropriate features of a built environment without compromising the organization’s focus on and reverence for the outdoors.

The Center is a place of welcome, inclusion, and instruction for program participants and other visitors, and serves as a functional and flexible home base for staff and volunteers. It accommodates the full breadth of the organization’s work, from grant writing, social media management, and board meetings to sharpening crosscut saws, Leave-No-Trace trainings, and feeding hungry trail crews.

Our world is full of structures that feel like an imposition on the natural landscape and simultaneously succeed in cutting us off from the outdoors. The Center, by contrast, is a space that invites the wild in and its users out. In its materials, scale, layout, and construction it strives to sit in responsive and considerate conversation with the surrounding native woodland. It touches the land as lightly as possible. It nudges its users’ attention and activity out of doors, and it attempts always to enable – not hinder – their sense of being at home in the wild.

From the earliest stages of the project, Wild Alabama was deeply committed to minimizing impact to the forested site. To support this goal, conceptual design was guided by a highly granular site study that included documenting the location and species of every living tree with a trunk diameter above 8”. Natural openings between these trees defined the volume and contour of candidate structures as the project entered schematic design, embodying Wild Alabama’s mission “to inspire people to enjoy, value ​and protect the wild places of Alabama.”