Project Description
FROM AIA NATIONAL:
The Josey Pavilion is a multi-functional education and meeting center that supports the mission of the Dixon Water Foundation to promote healthy watersheds through sustainable land management. Traditionally livestock has caused more harm than good by overgrazing and not allowing our native prairies to play their important role in habitat and watershed protection, and carbon sequestration. The Josey Pavilion facilitates a deeper understanding of how grazing livestock as well as the built environment can work to do more good than harm.
As stated by Dr. Lisa Bellows, a North Central Texas College biology professor that uses the facility regularly, “The pavilion is a place for learning and gathering, for laughing schoolchildren with muddy hands and ranchers swapping stories and strategies. But it is also a space for tranquility. There is no omnipresent mechanical whirring that pervades the soundtrack to most Texans’ indoor lives. Seated in the herbarium or resting on the porch, you can listen deeply, to the prairie silence, or the shush of grasses and quiet clatter of oak leaves in a breeze. You feel tapped into a purposeful stillness, like being in the middle of a grazing herd, one being working dutifully among many, interconnected in a balanced whole.”