Visitor centers at nature preserves and historic sites provide valuable services. But the visitors come to see the attraction itself, not the visitor center. They use it, but they don't want to see it. One effective way to meet their need for services without cluttering the area with a distracting extra building is to tuck the visitor center underground. Throughout the United States, effective examples have sprouted down. The one featured in this article is in, of all places, a naturealm.

In 1964, Akron, Ohio, added a 100-acre parcel to its Metro Parks system of nature preserves and named it with a new word formed by combining the words nature and realm. Its full name also commemorates the founder of The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, F. A. Seiberling, who had once owned the parcel and who had donated 400 acres of land for the adjoining Sand Run Metro Park. Part of the Naturealm was maintained as a preserve for the area's natural environment, part was developed as an arboretum featuring more than 300 kinds of trees and shrubs, and part was transformed into a rock and herb garden. With the great variety of plants and, in addition, the habitats they provided for animal life, the Naturealm needed an interpretive center.

When the Metro Parks system bought the Naturealm land, a small house that was included in the deal was adapted for use as a visitor center. Eventually, plans were developed for a more spacious building that would be better suited to that function. A key consideration was to design it to blend with its environment rather than to intrude on it. What better way could there be to do that than to hide it in a small hill?

With that concept in mind, in 1989, the park commission selected the Terra-Dome Corporation to design and build the structure. At that point, Terra-Dome had 10 years of experience planning and constructing earth-sheltered buildings. Its approach is to configure a number of appropriately sized room modules to form the desired building. Each module consists of poured-in-place reinforced-concrete floors and walls capped with a dome engineered to withstand the weight of the rooftop soil and plants.

Construction began with digging out space in the top of an earthen mound to accommodate the 9,400-square-foot building, which would consist of twelve 28'x28' modules. Two months after ground was broken, the building was structurally complete. Interior finishing, landscaping, and installing exhibits took another year. The center, which opened to the public in late 1991, contains 4,000 square feet of exhibit space in several rooms, a 90-seat auditorium, a multi-purpose room that can be used for classes or meetings, a library, a gift counter, offices, a workshop, and a darkroom.

Following a winding, paved path from the parking lot, visitors gradually become aware that the visitor center is actually in the hill ahead. An integral part of the landscape, its subtle facade invites people to literally enter into nature. But the interior feels nothing like a burrow or a cave. Paint on the walls and ceiling is a soft earth tone. Domed ceilings and wide, slightly arched doorways between exhibit rooms contribute to a feeling of spaciousness. Some rooms are topped with skylights, and one exhibit room has a window wall that invites leisurely observation of a large pond from a comfortable, weather-sheltered environment.

The Naturealm visitor center is attractive, comfortable, and useful. But it is not perfect. In 2000, the soil and vegetation had to be removed from the top of the building so a leaky roof could be repaired. Costing more than $200,000, the repairs were finished by the following summer, but it will take time to reestablish the lush ground, or rather, roof cover.

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