For more than five years, Highland Park residents and local authorities were at odds as to how to comply with a Federal mandate requiring the covering of all drinking water supplies by 2001. The Highland Park community convinced City officials that architectural and landscape consultants should be added to the engineering team. From the beginning, the new consultants were charged with to adding a fresh, creative eye to the design process and energizing a public process that was at an impasse. In the end, it was a cutting edge technology that made the eventual solution possible. Membrane filtration was the preferred alternative to the other options under consideration; covering, tanking or submerging. The membrane filtration facility would have to meld into a wooded setting without calling attention to its utilitarian function, while at the same time housing what at the time would be the largest filtration system of its kind in the United States.    Engineering designs called for a 50-foot-high hydraulic control tower to be hidden within the mass of the building. Instead, the massing was reorganized by the architectural team to use the tower as a focal element on the front of the building. The steeply pitched slate roof of the nearby watch house built in the 1920s, as well as other park structures in the City, served as precedents for the genesis of the building’s vocabulary. The vocabulary also drew upon European Romantic building styles in the adjoining residential neighborhood.   VIEW FROM PARK ROAD VIEW FROM FILTRATING CREEK ELEVATION