Located along Chongqing’s Jialing River, this new linear public park offered unique challenges: a 30-meter annual river fluctuation, steep topography, and low-impact maintenance of a continuous riparian corridor. Adjacent new urban development, with attendant needs for green space, called for a flexible and resilient approach to the park’s landscape and infrastructure.
The design for Golden Shoal (also known as Jin Hai Wan) Riverfront Park took the overlapping layers of terrestrial, aquatic, and cultural and natural heritage into account. SWA wanted to provide an accessible, playful riverfront within a long and narrow stretch of land: one that would be both ecologically and socially resilient. Water quality is maintained through controlled release at all park levels, preserving existing topography and plantings against erosion. The resulting park design blends the site’s riparian and industrial heritage with a new layer of elements, while building in new access to the river and its adjacent lands for an emerging district’s residents and visitors.
Resonant Memory: One October Memorial
Inspired by the shared love of country music that brought people from all over the world together for the Route 91 Music Festival, Resonant Memory is based on the shape of an acoustic guitar. The design makes particular use of the instrument’s sound hole as a recurring motif to represent absence, honoring the lives lost on October 1, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada...
Bayfront Parks Master Plan
Bounded by the scenic Hudson to the east, Jersey City is lined with high-rise towers and waterfront parks offering views of Manhattan. To the west, the often-overlooked Hackensack features wetlands, industry, and degraded post-industrial sites. The Bayfront Redevelopment Master Plan aims to transform a formerly contaminated 100-acre site on the Hackensack Rive...
Buffalo Bayou Park
This thoroughly renovated, 160-acre public space deploys a vigorous agenda of urban ecological services and improved pedestrian accessibility, with two new bridges connecting surrounding neighborhoods. The design utilizes channel stabilization techniques, enhancing the bayou’s natural meanders and offering increased resiliency against floodwaters while preserv...
Changchun Tractor Factory Renovation
Once-industrial site re-imagined as a commercial complex with eye-catching public spaces.
For this site, which was once an industrial tractor factory that epitomized Changchun’s thriving industrial past, SWA provided conceptual design through implementation to transform the former of Changchun Tractor Factory into an eye-catching public realm that fulfi...