Inspired by the idea of movement, this collaboration with Studios Architecture achieves an artful harmony of building with landscape, program with site. The image of a dancer in grand jete kindled the designers’ imaginations and served as the project’s organizing idea. Asia’s first professional dance complex is tucked between a freeway, a subway station and a park at a prominent edge of Shanghai. The project’s scheme integrates historic buildings, and provides an appropriate separation of public and performance spaces from private living and educational spaces as well as a functional and ceremonial arrival and drop-off area. At the large central plaza, a dramatic interactive fountain welcomes visitors and creates a sense of drama for public performances. The feature may be shut off to create outdoor space for larger public gatherings. The plaza provides access to the Center’s four new buildings, each with its own distinctive outdoor courtyard. Courtyards are carved into the landscape, with the new spaces offering a variety of experiences for learning and performance. In this new amenity for the public, curving bands of paving, along with rows of trees, hedges and promenades sweep through the landscape, where seating and water features welcome visitors from the surrounding city.
Stanford Branner Hall
Branner Hall is a three-story undergraduate dormitory built in 1924 by Bakewell and Brown, prominent architects of the time who were also responsible for San Francisco’s City Hall. The renovation design creates two significant courtyards: an entrance courtyard flanked with four-decades-old magnolia trees shading a seating area and an interior courtyard with a ...
CyFair College
The CyFair College Campus is a model for environmentally responsible development and restoration of a sensitive ecosystem. Located on the suburban fringe of northwest Houston, it is surrounded by the Katy Prairie, an endangered ecosystem of coastal prairie grass meadows marked by groves of trees and connected to a system of wetlands, bayous, and ponds.
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CREATE Campus, National University of Singapore
CREATE, the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise, is an international research campus and innovation hub at the National University of Singapore. Home to a vibrant scientific community, CREATE hosts the National Research Foundation, interdisciplinary research centers from top universities, and corporate laboratories such as the Singapore...
Miwok Aquatic and Fitness Center
Nestled in Novato’s rolling Oak woodlands, the College of Marin’s Miwok Aquatic and Fitness Center provides Northern California with a new destination for aquatic training and competitions. Part of the College’s Indian Valley Campus, the center neighbors over 1,400 acres of open space preserves. ELS and SWA worked closely to lay out the site ...