Northwest Vista College is situated in the oak covered hills west of San Antonio, with beautiful views toward the city and surrounding valley. Previously the design team completed an extensive master plan that accommodated for the expansion of the college facilities to three times its current size. The design seeks to sensitively integrate the nearly 400,000 square feet of new buildings and associated roads and parking into the pristine oak covered hills that surround the campus. Careful grading and alignments of proposed infrastructure elements allows for the preservation of existing trees throughout the campus. Additional landscaping applies native plantings with minimal irrigation outside of the primary pedestrian gathering spaces. The heart of the campus incorporates a 2.5 acre lake situated in a natural ravine. The lake serves to visually connect the two sides of the campus while also providing for storm water detention requirements. Bio-filtration and stillen basins help to capture sediments and pollutants before releasing storm water flows into the natural drainage channels that exit the site to the south. The east side of the campus is formed by a series of new buildings terraced up a gentle hillside and arranged around a sloped quadrangle. A new fine arts center will anchor the upper portion of the quad, and serve as the architectural centerpiece of the campus as viewed from the lake below and surrounding community.
Stanford West Apartments
SWA has placed a special emphasis on maintaining the riparian corridor with native planting, using consideration when dealing with the archaeologically sensitive areas of the site, as well as existing recreation trails and landscape amenities such as parks and play areas. The internal street grid, architectural and landscape elements are designed to recall the...
Medgar Evers College
This new quad provides a unifying pedestrian connection between Bedford and Franklin Avenues and between existing and new campus buildings, finally providing the campus with a cohesive identity and sense of place. With the dramatic transformation of a parking lot into more campus green space comes the opportunity to integrate a series of sustainability strateg...
Soka University
When Japan-based Soka Gakkai International, one of the world’s largest lay Buddhist organizations, decided to establish a fully accredited liberal arts university in southern Orange County, SWA joined with the architects to create a setting that expresses the goals of the new university. Soka means “to create value” and the ideal of Soka education is to foster...
Stanford Hoover Institution Traitel Building
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is a public policy research organization promoting the principals of individual, economic, and political freedom. CAW and SWA collaborated as a design team to create a building and site that helped promote research collaboration through open site connections and workspace.
SWA focused on a site design that s...