Downtown Summerlin is a 109-acre, high-end retail and entertainment lifestyle center forming the heart of a 22,500-acre master-planned community in the western suburbs of Las Vegas. The landscape design emphasizes the need for comfort and shade while drawing upon the natural desert environment as a visual source for materials, colors, and textures. By distilling the surroundings into their simplest forms—desert floor, canyon wall, and sky—a contemporary abstract framework was created for the project’s horizontal, vertical, and overhead surfaces. The landscape design strives to present a unique retail environment by creating spaces that reflect the natural environment, as well as the history and heritage of iconic Las Vegas, while remaining autonomous from both.
Envision Willowick
The Cities of Garden Grove and Santa Ana are developing a “vision” for redevelopment of the Willowick Golf Course site. This process explored conceptual land use options that are formed by community and stakeholder collaboration and input. The Visioning is intended to be used to guide the preparation of development plans for Willowick. The visioning...
Shaoxing Paojiang Sales Center
As a model home sales center, the first concern of this project is to guide visitors from the entrance to the exhibition center in an elegant and impressive way. Shaoxing is famous for its natural and cultural heritage, which inspired the design of several elements: a “blue galaxy” pool, southern concept frame wall, galaxy walk, inkwell pool, and flower garden...
Avenida Houston
SWA and the architect’s narrative of nature and industry united underscores the design of the new 140,000-square-foot (3-1/2 acre) Avenida Houston plaza, adjacent to the freshly renovated George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. Key to the theme of nature as it plays out in this new events space is the famous central flyway that offers hundreds o...
Poly Pazhou Mixed-Use
The iconic architecture and riverside context that characterize Poly Pazhou were inspirations in this SWA/SOM collaboration, which also took adjoining development in the burgeoning region into account. Broad, sweeping landscape, featuring diverse local plant species, embraces both the soaring buildings and the Pearl River corridor, extending its spatial charac...