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.
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, ...
Guiyang Hot Springs
Guiyang Hot Springs, located in Guiyang City, China, brings together the rhythm of the Nanming River, and surrounding trails and trees to create a new urban ‘living room’ in the interstitial space created by new development and roadway infrastructure. Nestled into a mountainous site, the master planning addressed elevation changes of up to 100 meters and the e...
Lujiazui Financial Culture Park
On the eastern bank of the Huangpu River, the renovation of Lujiazui Financial Culture Park opens the site’s boundaries, inviting the public into much-needed green space in the densely developed business district. All walls were removed, adding several small entrances and renovating the main entrance to include interactive water features and local species that...
King Salman Park
The largest urban public park ever built, King Salman Park is a defining element of Saudi Vision 2030—an ambitious effort to transform Riyadh into a more livable, sustainable, and globally competitive city. Envisioned as the “Green Lung of Riyadh,” the 16.6-square-kilometer park spans seven times the size of London’s Hyde Park and five times that of New York’s...