Since its inception in 1996, Landworks Studio has practiced comprehensive design synthesis through the identification, consideration and informed articulation of the technical, environmental and infrastructural inherencies of contemporary landscape projects. In the last few years, we dramatically expanded our portfolio of work, with a large number of projects currently in progress. We are proud to call our clients architects, developers, and planning agencies at home and abroad. Some of our recent project still on the board are listed below.

Visit our ON THE BOARDS PORTFOLIO on Tumblr to view these projects in more detail, or simply click the IMAGES link for each project.

Indianapolis Art Park
Nexus park, for new development in downtown Indianapolis, that overlays program and art installations woven into ecological zones and grounded in sustainable principles including the collection, treatment, and re-use or storm water runoff. IMAGES

701 2nd Street NE
For key mixed use building within the urban redevelopment of H-Street Corridor in Northeast Washington DC, the project extends the image and quality of the building into the public realm and creates a hyper-social ground floor and rooftop for residents and visitors alike. IMAGES

NorthPoint Gateway and Pocket Park
Crucial connective open spaces designed for NorthPoint mixed use redevelopment of an old railroad yard in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. IMAGES

Suning International IT Headquarters Park
Headquarters park for one of the largest privately-owned electronics retailers in China, the park is centered on the seamless integration of architecture and environment and features site-sensitive strategies for creating sustainable building and landscape design while framing a cohesive campus identity and maximizing views to the regional mountains. IMAGES

Nandasoft Innovation Technology Development Park
Well-defined hierarchy of park-like spaces, the project is the landscape component of master plan design for large urban technology campus that includes public facilities and commercial establishments designed to companies, innovators, scientists, and designers. IMAGES

Dareen East Beach
A 173 acre project on the Arabian Gulf, designed to serve not only the needs of a rapidly growing city, but also to draw visitors from the greater region, the park is composed of three distinct layers: a neighborhood park, a sequence of large earth forms, and an ecological island. IMAGES

Jubail Regional Park
Masterplan for large (10,000 acre) iconic park that utilizes the excess water ecologically—by filtering and cleaning industrial wastewater—and encourages interactions between the visitors and the local culture, hydrology, and geology through an attractive programmatic. IMAGES

Jubail Highways
The Jubail Highway Project, comprised of three interconnected highways that total 44 kilometers, links the industrial zone of the city with the expanding civic, institutional, and residential core, each of the highways designed to communicate a distinct character to visitors and residents alike: the verdant corridor, the oasis parkway, and the desert highway. IMAGES

Jalmudah Shoreline Park
The design for this 320 acre waterfront public park mediates and prioritizes space between human use and restored shoreline ecology. IMAGES

Landworks Studio has recently completed work on Square 673, a fourteen-story, one thousand unit apartment building—also known as First & M Condominiums because of its location at the crossroads of First Street and M Street in Washington DC. The project relies upon the idea of absolute connectivity to unite outdoor and indoor spaces throughout the ground floor of the complex, whose landscape spaces include an interior courtyard, program-rich roof gardens, an entrance court, and streetscape for three sides of the new buildings. To further supplement the idea of connectivity, the client requested a landscape of a baroque character with rich materiality and an undulating formal language that could easily transfer into an interior topography.

Working closely with Studios Architecture and Archstone, Landworks Studio devised an integrated series of indoor-outdoor spaces that utilize a carefully calibrated sculptural weave as the mechanism for providing multimedia program and varied experiential qualities. As an organizing device, this weave takes the form of interlocking, continuous spline curves that, appearing and disappearing, deform to become seating, water features, planting beds, retaining walls, and media screens (click here to view project concept work). The resulting spaces have been precisely scaled to facilitate uses such as media screen viewing, inward facing seating for group conversation, and outward-facing seating for people watching. In contrast, when these unique spaces are viewed from a distance—such as from the upper story residential units—they visually compress to provide an iconic identity for the project.

The sinuous lines of the Square 673 courtyard act as an armature that guides visitors through sequential outdoor lounge areas, or ‘living rooms’ at different scales. Rather than sequencing these spaces in a linear manner, the circuitous organization of the armature ensures that visitors experience views and activities that are constantly changing as they move through the space.

Materially, the armature takes the form of heat-formed white acrylic benches—fabricated by CAPCO—that glow from within to provide ambient lighting to the courtyard. These benches double as retaining walls that structure an undulating topography comprised of richly vegetated mounds punctuated by Hophornbeams and American Hornbeams. To serve as counterpoint to the curves of the benches and landforms, a wide linear watercourse flows from the front lobby, weaving through the first courtyard in an interplay with the pixelated groundplane paving. This watercourse introduces dynamic sensory phenomena: the white noise—and cooling effect—of falling water, as well as the spectacular effects of sunlight reflecting off the water’s surface.

In an example of the connectivity that guides the project, the bench armatures penetrate the building walls to define interior gathering and program spaces in the indoor public spaces just as they do in the exterior courtyard. This is the result of an excellent working relationship between Landworks Studio, Studios Architecture, and the client, who worked to seamlessly blend disciplines—this has yielded some unexpected ideas and helped attain a complex blurring of interior and exterior spaces along the ground floor. In another example of disciplinary integration, the courtyard creatively interprets the expression of massive vents to the three-level underground parking garage that lies below. By cladding them with dynamic materials such as wild vegetation, lights inspired by the artist Dan Flavin, and an interactive stainless steel “mediamesh” that projects images and colors across its surface, the eighteen-foot tall vents become artistic installations rather than dreary mechanical structures.

CAPTIONS (Top to Bottom)
Nighttime aerial view of completed courtyard (Credit: Jim Sullivan/CAPCO)
Rendered view of acrylic benches (Credit: CAPCO)
Panoramic view of concrete walls
Detail section of bench construction
Rendered view of courtyard (Credit: Josh Katz)
View of bench assembly on site

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Archstone
Collaborators: STUDIOS Architecture, Davis Carter Scott, Paradigm Construction
Consultants: CAPCO – Capital Plastics Company (Bench Fabricator/Rendering), WESCO Fountains Inc. (Fountain Consultant), Art Display Company (Bench Lighting Consultant), Josh Katz (Digital Rendering)
Josh Katz Renderings
Project Location: Washington, DC
Project Size: 9,000 SF
Status: Completed 2012

To enhance the cultural message of each interchange as it welcomes regional and local traffic, The Royal Commission for Jubail engaged Landworks Studio and CBT+FAEC to develop a comprehensive landscape strategy for the highway network of Jubail, a rapidly growing industrial city located along Saudi Arabia’s coast near Qatar and Bahrain. The scope of work includes over 44 kilometers of formal design, plantings, and shelterbelt buffers across three major highways—Highway 4, Highway, 6, and Highway 7—which thread through the city, establishing links between the infrastructural, industrial, and urban areas of Jubail. The landscape strategy employs gradually morphing repetitive motifs to establish a distinct identity for each of the three highways: Highway 4 as the ‘Verdant Corridor’ through the urban core, Highway 6 as the ‘Oasis Parkway’ marking the international gateway into the city, and Highway 7 as the ‘Desert Highway’ that winds through the industrial zone.

To capitalize upon the linear experience of traveling by car along the different highways, Landworks Studio designed plantings and landform elements that come together to form gradually changing gradients of color, shape, scale, and density. A focused planting strategy concentrates planting at landforms, medians, and tree-lined stone ribbons that thread through the desert landscape. Irrigation will occur only in these areas, establishing striking, verdant zones in contrast to the naturalized desert. The intensity of planting will increase as the driver approaches, with median plantings and large landform mounds increasing towards the center of the interchange. Attention has been given to selecting regionally appropriate plant species with low maintenance requirements. The mounds and medians will be planted with drought tolerant shrubs, and the stone ribbons will be planted with palm trees. Planting viability is determined by the availability of irrigation; shrubs and trees will require minimal maintenance beyond the required irrigation.

The longest of the three highways, Highway 7, the Desert Highway (show in the birdseye view), provides access to the city’s many industrial plants. To screen the unsightly industrial fabric, Landworks Studio designed landforms that evoke the region’s shifting sand dunes, which have been distilled into ten modular wall types that are deployed in a random pattern along the roadways. Given the sheer length of this highway and the massive scale of its interchanges, the planting strategy and earthworks are more subdued than the other two highways; to cut costs, the hardy desert plantings are irrigated by treated wastewater from the industrial plants and undulating walls and dunes are strategically positioned along the roadways to maximize dynamic views across the entire length of the interchanges. Integral to these dynamic views is the layering of foreground and background dunes, whose forms shift, curve and bend to fluctuate not only based on the driver’s position along the banked on- and off-ramps, but also with the desert’s high-contrast interplay of light and shadow.
 
PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Royal Comission for Jubail
Architect: CBT+FAEC (Architects/Engineers)
Project Location: Jubail, Saudi Arabia
Project Size: 44 linear kilometers
Status: On the boards
Text: Andrea Hansen
 

Landworks Studio is proud to announce that it has been selected as a 2012 Honor Award recipient by both the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects for its work at 200 Fifth Avenue. Landworks Studio and Studios Architecture joined together to sensitively remodel the historic building at 200 Fifth Avenue in New York. The building once functioned as a grand hotel, and, starting in 1950, it served for decades as a hub for toy manufacturers as the International Toy Center. One of many buildings that forged the architectural heritage of New York’s Flatiron District, its U-shaped configuration was considered highly innovative when it was built in 1909, due to its ability to bring natural light into the building’s interior and its creation of a courtyard for the building’s tenants.

In 2007, the new owner, L&L Holding Company, hired the Landworks Studio and Studios Architecture team to re-conceptualize and reinvigorate the fifteen-story commercial building by improving the quality of the workplace environment while preserving its historic architectural quality. Energy efficiency, water reduction, daylighting, green building materials, and improved indoor air quality were a just few of the renovations planned to improve the building’s environmental performance, not only to save on energy costs over time, but also to create better working conditions. In addition to removing harmful toxins, circulating fresh air, and flooding spaces with natural light, the project also incorporated access to outdoor spaces such as the remodeled courtyard. Beyond providing fresh air in a verdant setting—a rare privilege for many Manhattan residents—the courtyard responds to the changing dynamics of contemporary office culture by encouraging chance encounters and offering respite from workplace stress.

The team’s proposal creates a four-tiered series of office spaces located mainly within the footprint of the existing building. The terraces that result gave Landworks Studio the opportunity to create an elegant and functional landscape to serve everyday users, as well as large groups during special events.

Three main landscape elements insert new program into the historic armature: a vegetated ground plane, folding tray, and light cloud. First, the ground plane is constructed of a stainless steel framework planted with a dense carpet of moss. Hovering six inches above, a pre-cast concrete tray contorts to form a continuous walking surface, planters, and benches. Stainless steel planters containing ferns slide into benches along the edges of the tray, and in-grade light strips and trench drains slide through the joints of the concrete tray. The light cloud extends out from the lobby in the lowest terrace and reemerges on the upper terrace to create a memorable landscape experience for evening events.

Through the insertion of a contemporary landscape into a significant but dated historic structure, the building at 200 Fifth Avenue is transformed to enable the complex and dynamic interactions that define contemporary working relationships. This accomplishment is the result of rigorous collaboration between client, architect, and landscape architect, whose unified vision for the renovation increased the property’s real estate demand, reduced its environmental footprint, and most importantly, made it a vibrant, enjoyable, and functional space for its users.

PROJECT CREDITS
Architect: Studios Architecture
Construction Manager: Structure Tone Inc.
MEP Engineers: FMC Engineering
Lighting Consultant: Johnson Light Studio
Green Building Consultant: CodeGreen
Precast Concrete Fabricator: Concreteworks Studio
Landscaping Contractor: Harder Tree and Landscape Services, Inc.
Architectural Metal Fabricator: A-Val Architectural Metal Corp.
Bamboo Supplier: New England Bamboo
Moss Supplier: Moss Acres
Photograph: Andrea Varutti

Over the past few years LANDWORKS Studio, Inc., a 15-person design firm in Boston Massachusetts, has witnessed a dramatic period of growth. The commissions that we accept are being defined by an ever-increasing diversity of scale and type as well as geographic location. Over the course of this period, LANDWORKS Studio, Inc. has remained committed to design excellence and to the advancement of artful and relevant responses to complex ecologically and culturally challenged sites and conditions.

In order to meet the expanded needs and requirements that have accompanied this tremendously exciting time, we are seeking the services of a Senior Landscape Architect and overall office leader.

POSITION REQUIREMENTS

• Superior design skills and extensive experience in the following project areas: high-density urban housing and mixed-use development, brownfield redevelopment, urban parks, campus, and institutional projects. When evaluating applicants, we will place special emphasis on the applicant’s commitment to design excellence and how that commitment is buttressed by demonstrable, razor sharp management skills.

• Ability to provide steady in-house design leadership and guidance on multiple projects and general office fronts, while engendering enthusiasm and trust from and amongst the younger design staff.

• Since the majority of our work is both domestic (Northeastern and Midwestern United States: Boston, NYC, Washington, DC, Indianapolis, Connecticut) and international (large scale, ongoing work in the Middle East, China, and Taiwan), some travel will be required.

OTHER REQUIREMENTS

• 8-12 years of relevant experience (licensure required – MLA Preferred)

• Exceptional design and graphic skills: hand drawing, facility with AutoCAD, 3d modeling skills (Sketch Up, Rhino, Max) and Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.

• Exceptional technical skills.

• Exceptional communication skills.

LANDWORKS Studio, Inc. provides a highly competitive benefits package.
For consideration, please forward a letter of interest including salary expectations, resume, portfolio, and references to:

Michael Blier, Principal
c/o: LANDWORKS Studio, Inc.
112 Shawmut Avenue, Studio 6B
Boston, MA 02118

If your prefer to email your work, please send an email to (enclosures 10 MB max): swatt@landworks-studio.com

Landworks Studio, Inc. worked closely with architects at Santos Prescott and Associates to design the park and office campus for the International Headquarters for the IT division of the Suning Appliance Company, one of the largest privately-owned electronics retailers in China. The landscape concept for the Suning IT Headquarters Park is centered on the seamless integration of architecture and environment. The design features site-sensitive strategies for creating sustainable building and landscape design, while also framing a cohesive campus identity and maximizing views to the regional mountains.

The landscape strategy for the park works with the existing topography of the site to create a campus that is structured around two distinct building typologies. Along the high ground at the northern edge of the site, a series of hills frame the formal entry to the site and park, and create elevated ground for larger office buildings. These ‘ headquarter buildings’ feature a central, light-filled, multi-story atrium, as well as two lower levels of parking that are embedded within the hills. The hills are framed by a sculptural, undulating edge that acts as a frame for the central park. South of the park, smaller ‘workstation buildings’ are arranged in terraces that gradually step with the topography towards the lower southern edge of the site. The workstation buildings are twin-type buildings with 4-5 stories of individual live-work units. Automobile access to the workstation buildings is buried within the site, enabling direct access from cars into each unit, while preserving the park level above for pedestrian use.

Vehicular circulation on the campus is located around the perimeter of the site, as well as below the first level of the buildings. As a result, the park landscape forms the primary connective network for the site. The central park acts as a topographic threshold between the headquarter hills and workstation terraces, and provides space for gathering and meandering. The headquarter clusters are connected to the central park by a series of steps that are embedded in the sculptural edge of the hillside. The workstation terraces are connected to the park by a series of pedestrian ‘spines’ that bridge the central park and southern site edge.

In addition to integrating the architecture and park elements, the building siting strategies respond to the natural features of the environment to incorporate a sustainable design strategy. The workstation buildings are arranged in staggered rows to step down with the sloped topography of the site, while also allowing the prevailing east-west winds to move through the site and provide natural ventilation to the buildings. Cuts into the ground plane adjacent to the workstation and headquarter buildings allow the spaces within the building to merge with the landscape, while also providing daylight to the lower levels of the buildings. Overall, the ‘hills and valleys’ strategy of the landscape design directs the movement of water on the site to areas within the central park and southern edge of the site, allowing the storm water management strategy to work within the context of a park that is largely on structure.

PROJECT CREDITS
Client: Suning Appliance Co., Ltd.
Lead Architect: Santos Prescott Associates
Collaborators: Atelier Ten
Project Location: Nanjing, China
Project Size: 8.5 hectares
Status: Schematic Design, Ongoing

Dareen East Beach is a 70 hectare park on the Arabian Gulf, designed to serve not only the needs of a rapidly growing city, but also to draw visitors from the greater region. The park is composed of three distinct layers: a neighborhood park, a sequence of large earth forms, and an ecological island.

The first layer, directly adjacent to a newly constructed housing development, is the 15 hectare Neighborhood Park. Pergolas and dense plantings of deciduous trees offer relief from the sun while large expanses of lawn and splash fountains offer opportunities for family gathering and play.

The central layer is composed of a sequence of large landforms designed to add topographical complexity to the site as well as conceal water tanks that house the treated wastewater used for irrigation. The mounds terminate in a waterfront promenade that allows visitors direct access, via terraces and ramps, to the fluctuating tides of the Gulf. Plantings and pergolas offer respite from the sun while the mounds and benches offer seating for evening gatherings and events.

The final layer is a 24 hectare island dune landscape that will be planted with native grasses, salt-tolerant shrubs, and mangroves. Beaches, nature trails, and sites for picnics and camping will offer a quiet escape from the city, attracting human visitors as well as migratory birds and wildlife.

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Royal Commission for Jubail
Collaborators: FAEC+CBT Associate Architects and Engineers
Project Location: Jubail, Saudi Arabia
Project Size: 70 hectares
Status: Concept Design Completed 2011

As part of a long-standing tradition, each year the graduating class of Choate Rosemary Hall, a prestigious boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, present the school with a graduation gift—often a bench, fountain, plaque, or other public memorial. When the class of 2008 decided to convert an overlooked exterior passageway into a gathering space for future classes, Choate asked Studio ABK Architects to undertake the transformation, and Landworks Studio was called upon as a consultant for the landscape design. As the students raised money from classmates, parents, faculty and alumni, Landworks Studio developed a unique, sustainable concept that ultimately replaced a nondescript circulation space between the Student Activities Center and Larry Hart Pool with a vibrant, engaging courtyard for organized events or casual meetings.

The existing site was surfaced with 60-centimeter impermeable concrete pavers that formed a long linear grid. The new design utilized this grid in order to minimize costs and site work. Spanning the entire 40-meter length of the courtyard is an undulating white bench that replaces a single stripe of pavers from the original courtyard. This bench is the physical and social centerpiece of the “Senior Spot,” and to make it truly special, the students requested that each donor’s name be etched into the bench in recognition of his or her contribution to the project. Every donor’s name has been formed from Lumistone™—a photoluminescent material—and inlaid into the Corian™ surface of the bench. After nightfall, the names emit a blue glow, softly lighting the courtyard and reminding passersby of the students and friends of Choate who made this very special space possible.

To promote sustainability on the site through the natural infiltration of rainwater and runoff from hardscaped areas throughout the courtyard and the larger campus, the areas beneath the benches have been filled with river rocks. Moreover, groupings of additional pavers throughout the site have been taken up and replaced with Green Grids, which are modular, recycled plastic trays that can be planted with a range of perennials. As a finishing touch, tables and chairs—coordinated to match the white bench—provide additional seating along the north side of the courtyard and reinforce the social function of the space.

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Choate Rosemary Hall
Architect: Studio ABK Architects
Fabrication: Sterling Surfaces
Photographs by: Jeff Baumgart/Sterling Surfaces
Location: Wallingford, Connecticut, USA
Project Size: 6,500 SF
Status: Completed 2008

The urban design for the Opera House Cultural District establishes a landscape and urban spatial identity for a two-block area along North Sixth Road in a rapidly developing section of Taichung, Taiwan. The area is the home of two signature residential properties, Pao Huei Tower and The Park Tower, as well as the world-class Taichung Opera House designed by Toyo Ito. To accommodate increased foot traffic, Landworks Studio’s design for a robustly planted streetscape and plaza—of about two hundred large Taiwanese Zelkovas—forges material and experiential connections between the new landmarks and the rest of the city. The landscape acts as the connective tissue that unites the diverse architecture styles of the adjacent buildings and guides the fluid movement of pedestrians through a series of varied experiences.

Each of the initially proposed four schemes relied on a different formal operation to create a connective and experientially vibrant urban landscape: Study One, “Undulation,” employed sculptural mounds to gracefully organize a series of pedestrian movements through the garden; Study Two, “Folding,” deployed a series of folding planes that slope upward from the center of the plaza; Study Three, “Carving,” used elevated planting beds striated with bands of planting flush with the ground plane. In each of the schemes, large Zelkova canopy trees provide cooling shade and minimize the visual impact of the nearby Tiger Mall building.

Study Four, “Rippling,” which was ultimately chosen for construction, interprets the rhythmic cadence of a rippling line in both large-scale landforms and material details. Carving out the overall structure of the space, raised planters retained by angular granite walls create a zigzagging ‘ripple’ figure that serves to heighten the sense of layering and vegetative density in the garden. These landforms are organized according to a hierarchy of scales that move from larger ‘ripples’ at the edge of the garden—to screen views towards the parking lot—to smaller ripples at the center. The ripple motif is carried through in a more subtle manner to the stone pavement and benches, which are intricately cut and set with precision to yield an animated ground plane. Granite paving materials, which evoke the threadlike mineral deposits in Taichung’s mountainous landscape, are woven into the lower planting beds to establish a second type of movement through the urban garden. Finally, to symbolically extend the landscape into the rest of the city, the ripples move along North Sixth Road past the plaza’s boundaries, where the faceted walls provide a counterpoint to the straight line of the street edge, resulting in a variety of garden-like niches along the sidewalk.

To knit together commercial, residential, and civic uses through a captivating formal language, the site design drew inspiration from the bold forms and high-tech materials of the signature architectural projects in the Opera House Cultural District. In contrast to the straight and narrow urban canyons that characterize most open spaces in Taichung, this landscape’s topography of sculptural landforms and meandering paths thrusts people into and out of visual and physical contact with one another as they pause to take in a garden display, peer up at an architectural façade, disappear behind an earthform, or re-emerge into a gathering space.

PROJECT CREDITS

Client: Pao Huei Property Development
Collaborators: CBT Architects
Project Location: Taichung, Taiwan R.O.C.
Project Size: 3,100m2 (4 Urban Blocks)
Status: Estimated Completion 2012

In 2010, Mubadala Development Company invited four teams to compete for the design of a park and waterfront promenade at the center of the new Abu Dhabi Sowwah Island development, which includes new districts for commerce and entertainment as well as several major new roadways that connect the island to the rest of the city. Landworks Studio seized upon the particular multi-layer urbanity of the man-made island in their proposal that envisions the twin axes of the Grand Boulevard and the Spanish Steps as thickened landscape infrastructure to knit together the island’s neighborhoods, residential and office building lobbies, parking garages, and community centers.

Landwork Studio’s proposal sought to establish a bold new image of an urban park born out of a dynamic synthesis of city infrastructure (including the tram), architectural program, park program, intensive micro-climatic settings, vibrant indigenous plant communities, and an aggressive public art agenda. Given the formal customs and social strata of Abu Dhabi’s predominantly Islamic culture, Landworks Studio conceptualized the park as a series of layers and undulating ribbons that ramp up between the site’s multiple levels and provide a range of public and private spaces for gathering as well as independent circulation routes for shoppers, residents, and service and delivery staff moving via car or foot.

The stratified nature of the park also allowed Landworks Studio, who worked with Urban Art Projects as curators and art consultants, to dedicate space to an Arts and Culture walk that meanders through the park’s central spine. This walk serves as a centralized public armature for Sowwah Island and, being situated at the intersection of the island’s shops and civic institutions as well as being supported by transit, it will become a popular meeting place for people from all over the community.

Underscoring its function as a connective artery for the island’s residents and visitors, the vertical layering of the linear park also helps to fuse ecological performance with high quality visual and spatial experiences. Throughout the site, innovations made possible by the park’s layered nature deftly mediate a challenging, inhospitable climate to provide a range of desirable micro-environmental conditions, thus encouraging pedestrian activity in a city where walking outdoors is typically avoided at all costs. For example, features such as a perforated canopy provide visual interest and shields from the hot desert sun to create a more comfortable micro-climate for pedestrians, and the canopy’s surface area, paried with strategically placed funnel-shaped columns, channels rainwater into cisterns and helps to make the most of a very scarce resource.

Landworks Studio’s proposal for Sowwah Island Central Park is an exercise in urban adaptation: not only must the park negotiate a complex web of subgrade, at-grade, and above-grade buildings, transit, and mechanical infrastructure, but also it has to act as the island’s heart, skin, lungs, and connective tissue by bringing people together, protecting them from a harsh climate, and providing lush green microclimates that draw them outside. The re-imagining of a park as thickened infrastructure rather than a simple planted surface allows the proposal to be successful on all counts as it connects the park and commercial district to surrounding neighborhoods, orchestrates encounters between multiple user groups, and most importantly in a rapidly growing global metropolis, helps to position the city within a larger system of connected ecologies.

PROJECT CREDITS

Project Name: Sowwah Island Central Park Competition
Client: Mubadala Development Company
Project Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Size: 6.5 hectares
Consultants:
CBT Architects (Architects)
Buro Happold (Civil Engineer)
Davis Langdon (Construction Consultants)
Urban Art Projects (Curators and Art Consultants)
Status: Competition Submission 2010, Decision Pending