After nearly 15 years of being closed to the public, Bicentennial Park will soon provide a lively setting for neighborhood recreation. The City of Hawthorne has been home to many creative people throughout history: a legendary athlete and Olympian, Jim Thorpe; a world-famous movie star, Marilyn Monroe; and one of the most beloved American rock bands, The Beach Boys. The City is also at the center of the United States aerospace industry, home to Northrop Grumman and SpaceX. Hawthorne High School provides outstanding programs in engineering and manufacturing, promising a future generation of leading scientists. Yet today, more than 20 percent of the total population of Hawthorne lives below the poverty line and the community is victim to some of the worst environmental conditions in Southern California. In collaboration with The Trust for Public Land, the local community has worked for many years to redevelop the little-used and neglected Bicentennial Park property into a safe, welcoming recreational resource for city residents. Working closely with project stakeholders, SWA designers have developed a design for the park renovation inspired by Hawthorne s history and heritage. Focusing on the playground as a main feature of the park, SWA proposed the concept “Where Creative Minds Grow.” The park’s design concept features the history of aviation as a playful element, exposing generations young and old to the community’s unique history.
Griggs Park Redevelopment
Griggs Park, a historically important open space located in Uptown Dallas, had not kept pace with the ever-evolving culture and artistic neighborhood surrounding it. The new design reflects the changes in urban uses for the now-vibrant neighborhood. Established in the 1940s, the park is the first dedicated to an African American in Dallas. It transitioned with...
Halperin Park
In the 1950s, I-35E was routed through the South Dallas community of Oak Cliff, demolishing a thriving Black commercial corridor and one of the first Freedmen’s towns established after the Civil War. In the decades that followed, as in so many cities across the U.S., freeway construction severed long-standing social and economic ties and set in motion decades ...
Golden Gate National Recreation Area
In the early 1970s, the National Park Service began the enormous task of creating a new national recreation area in the midst of an urban center—the San Francisco Bay Area, home to 4.5 million people at the time. Riding the wake of the environmental revolution of the late 1960s, the Park Service would need to find consensus among a wide range of constituents, ...
Wuhan Huafa Capital Park
Wuhan Huafa Capital Development is located in the city’s urban core, amidst the hustle and bustle of busy streets and neighborhoods. The nearly 57,000-square-foot green space, adjacent to the Wuhan Capital Residential Development Sales Center, is envisioned to provide an immersive landscape experience for the sales center’s model housing area during the advert...