Shanghai EXPO’s Urban Best Practice Area surrounds the Plein Air Museum Park, which chronicles the unique and rich history of the site through objects of art, artifacts, and architecture. The landscape component of the museum park is expressed physically in the form of a Central Park: a gathering space and activity center for the community. The landscape was approached as a series of “fragments”: objects such as fountains, landforms, and sculptures as well as more defined spaces. In the Chengdu area, an entire garden was created, while elsewhere courtyards, bosques, and art installations predominate. Together, they form the central park and connect the Creative Innovation Center into one campus that is connected to the City, the surrounding community, and the river. SWA won an international competition for the project and provided full landscape architectural services.
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, ...
Ichigaya Forest
“Ichigaya Forest” is the privately owned, publicly accessible, major open space on Dai Nippon Printing Company’s 5.4-hectare new world headquarters in the Shinjuku Ward. Vertical development and production modernization that extends underground was made possible the creation of this 3.2-hectare open space. Over half the site is now planted wi...
Tianjin Culture Park
In the strategy for the upcoming integration of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province, the city of Tianjin has been identified as an advanced national manufacture and research base, as well as a core area of international shipping, a financial innovation demonstration zone, and a pilot region for the overall reformation of the area. The location of the SWA-desig...
Nickerson Gardens Playground
Originally designed in 1955 by architect Paul Revere Williams, Nickerson Gardens is a 1,066-unit apartment complex in Watts, South Los Angeles — the largest social housing project west of the Mississippi. Core to Williams’ vision was an emphasis on shared open space, but its central playground, neglected for years, fell into a state of disrepair. In collaborat...