Southeast Wyoming Welcome Center

The Southeast Wyoming Welcome Center is not your typical Visitor’s Center. Replacing an existing 20-year-old facility along the I-25 interstate between Colorado and Wyoming, the new Center demonstrates how a seamless approach to landscape, architecture, sustainability, and exhibition design can maximize a project’s potentials while minimizing environmental impacts, creating an engaging experience for visitors and employees alike.

Designed to be experienced on multiple scales, the building is first encountered in a wide-angle panorama as one approaches by car. Nestled within a site surrounded by substantial wetlands with native plantings that collect stormwater run-off, mannered landforms and trees provide a buffer between the building and highway while protecting the building’s localized microclimate from severe winds and snowdrifts. Once parked outside the Center, visitors are welcomed by pedestrian-scaled features including stone slabs embedded within grass leading to the entry, a rammed-earth façade, and a network of trails and outdoor pavilions that form an environmental learning landscape, connecting visitors with the ecology of Wyoming. 

Inside the building, a light-filled interactive and interpretive setting welcomes guests with coffee, multi-generational exhibits designed with museum-like intent and quality, and restful spaces animated by expansive views. Rich in experience and design details, a review from a recent visitor on trip advisor recounts, “This is the best welcome center of all 50—and I have been to them all.”