Brock Environmental Center
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation built the Brock Environmental Center at Pleasure House Point in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to engage, inform, and inspire generations about the environment and how we can all help save the Bay.
It serves as the hub of CBF’s Virginia Beach programs and is home to our mobile oyster restoration center and the Virginia Beach City Public Schools Environmental Studies Program for high school students. The Brock Center also hosts CBF’s award-winning environmental education programs through the Hampton Roads and Virginia Rivers & Streams East Environmental Education Programs. The Center also provides space for other local conservation partners, including Lynnhaven River NOW, and for community meetings and special events. Hold your event at our facility. Contact us to take a tour. Visit our educational Oyster Path or Pleasure House Point Trail.
Welcome to One of the World’s Greenest Buildings
The Brock Environmental Center is an innovative example of environmentally sensitive and smart building—among the first in the nation to embrace energy and water independence—and advances CBF’s efforts to defend one of the nation’s most valuable and threatened natural resources, the Chesapeake Bay. The building has both a LEED Platinum designation and full certification as a Living Building™, the most advanced measure of sustainable building. As a Living Building™, the Center is an international model for green-building techniques, materials, energy efficiency, water use, and landscaping. It is the first of its kind in Virginia. Follow the Brock Center’s water and energy-savings progress with the Living Building Challenge dashboard. The dashboard is a real-time gauge of the building’s energy and rainwater use and energy generation.
Elevated 14 feet above sea level, it is also a prototype for coping with climate change in a region increasingly prone to flooding.
Do you have questions about our green building? Email us at chesapeake@cbf.org.
Saving Pleasure House Point
As the last large, undeveloped waterfront property on the Lynnhaven River, Pleasure House Point was saved and permanently protected by a community-wide conservation effort led by local residents and conservation groups, the City of Virginia Beach, the Trust for Public Land, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. It is a quiet peninsula of beach, marsh, and maritime forest near the Lynnhaven Inlet. The Brock Environmental Center’s footprint uses less than an acre of CBF’s 10-acre parcel on the 118-acre site.
Experience it for yourself. Download the Pleasure House Point Trail Map. (Descargue la versión en español del mapa de senderos de Pleasure House Point.) Visit the City of Virginia Beach Parks & Recreation Pleasure House Point Natural Area website.
Making of a Green Building
What makes CBF’s Brock Environmental Center one of the most environmentally smart buildings in the world?
Smith Group JJR
Chuck Epes/CBF StaffMeet Macon and Joan Brock
Meet the people whose gift to the Brock Environmental Center and the Macon and Joan Brock Classroom will indelibly enrich and improve the Hampton Roads community.
Resources for the Brock Environmental Center
Join us and explore CBF's Brock Environmental Center. Learn about one of the most energy-efficient & environmentally smart buildings in the world! Take a virtual tour or request a guided tour.
CBF's Oyster Path will take you on a journey through not only CBF's oyster restoration programs, but also the science, history, and culture of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay region.
Visita el Brock Environmental Center, un centro dedicado al medio ambiente del Chesapeake Bay Foundation, y Pleasure House Point, una área natural de la ciudad de Virginia Beach.
See our real-time gauge of the building’s energy and water use and energy generation.
Driving directions and parking information for your visit.
