Portsmouth Square is the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown: the main civic park for all community festivals and events as well as an important day-to-day outdoor living room for the community. Centered in the densest community in the United States west of the Hudson River, the park plays a critical role in the health and well-being of the local residents, over 40 percent of whom live in single-occupancy units.
Since being established as Yerba Buena’s first public space in 1833, Portsmouth Square has undergone many iterations, culminating with the building of an underground parking garage with an RHAA-designed park on top in the 1970s. SWA led a year-long, community-participatory planning process to envision this park for the next generation structured around five large public workshops, working with approximately 20 community groups and 30 key stakeholders, and coordination with six city agencies. The design takes into account stormwater design, solar power, high albedo surfaces, urban forestry, all over an existing structure.
Gantry Plaza State Park
Once a working waterfront teeming with barges, tugboats, and rail cars, the Hunter’s Point shoreline slowly succumbed to the realities of the Post-Industrial Age and this spectacular site was left to deteriorate. Thomas Balsley Associates, together with Weintraub di Domenico, envisioned Gantry Plaza State Park as a place that celebrates its past, future, skyli...
Halperin Park
Halperin Park (previously known as Southern Gateway Park) caps Highway 35 in South Dallas directly adjacent to the Dallas Zoo and the Oak Cliff neighborhood. The park’s design effectively reconnects the neighborhood, which was cleaved by the highway’s construction many decades ago.
Recognizing the reunification’s significance, the cap park design introd...
Martin Luther King Jr. Square Water Quality Demonstration Park
The City of Conway received local and federal grants to create a water quality demonstration park in a flood-prone, one-block area of its downtown to educate the public about Low Impact Development (LID) and Green Infrastructure (GI) methods and how they can enhance water quality. The project transformed a remediated brownfield site, ...
The Clearing: Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial
This project was designed to honor the 20 children and six educators who were slain on Dec 14, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Designers Dan Affleck and Ben Waldo created a competition-winning design for a memorial space which is both open-ended and unifying in how it is experienced, honoring the full spectrum of emotions this tragedy evokes. They wanted...