Post #8 in a series
The Bathhouse sits inside the Barton Creek floodplain. That fact alone shaped what the City's own 2016 feasibility study said should happen to the Exhibits and Education Center — and it didn't happen that way.
What the 2016 Feasibility Study Recommended
The study pointed out that Austin City Code (§25-7-96) limits new construction inside a floodplain to a narrow list of small structures — a restroom or bath facility, a concessions stand, a tool shed, or a pump house, each under 1,000 square feet. A real Visitor's Center, in other words, legally couldn't be built at the Bathhouse itself. It had to go somewhere above the flood hazard zone.
So the study recommended exactly that: a new, stand-alone Visitor's and Education Center of 6,000 to 8,000 square feet, located near the children's playscape parking lot, within 500 feet of the Bathhouse Rotunda. The recommendation combined the Visitor Center, the Sheffield Education Center, and the SPLASH! exhibit into this one new building — both to share infrastructure costs and to properly integrate education into the visitor experience of the park. The study's own 2016 budget estimate for that new building was $3.5–$5.5 million, on top of roughly $12 million estimated for the rest of the project (which didn't include a firm number yet for Rotunda and dressing-room rehabilitation).
What BSC Was Raising Money For
Barton Springs Conservancy's own 2016–2017 promotional fundraising video, “For the Love of the Springs,” showed this same concept: a stand-alone Visitor Education Center, entirely separate from the Bathhouse, with its own classroom/office/meeting-room wing and a “Splash and Theater Wing,” plus exhibits on energy, water conservation, weather, geology, and bird-viewing. The City's agreement with BSC for BSC's original $3,000,000 contribution to the project was reached in 2016 — the same year as this video.
What Got Built Instead
By October 2018, Limbacher's design concepts had already folded the education and exhibit functions into the Bathhouse's Rotunda rather than placing them in a new, off-site building — the same pivot away from the 2016 study's Sheffield Education Center relocation that Post #4 of this series asked the City about. The finished project — covered earlier in this series — shows extensive exhibit, audio-visual, and IT infrastructure built directly into the Rotunda, the adjoining exhibit hall, and the Sheffield Education Center, all inside the historic, floodplain-sited Bathhouse itself.
Questions for a journalist:
- When was the plan for a separate, off-site Visitor and Education Center dropped, and by whom?
- Given the floodplain construction limits the 2016 study cited, how was education and exhibit space ultimately permitted inside the Bathhouse rather than in the new off-site building the study said was needed?
- Did donors who gave toward BSC's 2016 agreement know their money might end up funding education and exhibit space inside the Bathhouse, rather than the stand-alone Visitor Center shown in BSC's own fundraising materials?
Sources
2016 Zilker Park Bathhouse Zone Feasibility Study (City of Austin Parks + Recreation Department / MWM DesignGroup), pages 40–41 and 54. Barton Springs Conservancy promotional video, “For the Love of the Springs” (vimeo.com/216682712).
