The center celebrates the Lower Rio Grande Valley as the richest coastal migratory bird flyway in the world. Set in a twenty-five-hundred-acre park and wildlife refuge along the Rio Grande, the complex is designed as a backdrop to the landscape, with three buildings creating a set of distinctive courtyards to engage visitors with the outdoors. While its courtyard-plan concept is similar to the Laredo State Mental Health Care Facility (LA19) by the same firm, the World Birding Center takes its cues from its immediate context by using barrel-vaulted, self-supporting corrugated-metal roof shapes that recall the agricultural storage facilities widely used throughout the farming communities of the Rio Grande delta.