Located in West Houston, the Alief Neighborhood Center and Park serves one of the city’s most diverse communities. Over 90 languages are spoken in Alief, which is home to first-generation immigrants from across the world and refugees from as far away as Vietnam and close as Louisiana—especially in the wake up Hurricane Katrina, when many families made a permanent home in Houston.
Reopened to the public in January 2023, the project models a paradigm shift in community services, combining four City departments (Health, Parks, Libraries, and General Services) under one roof—a civic center at the heart of an entirely redeveloped 38-acre urban sports park. The center also features the “biggest front porch in West Texas,” a large, covered porch that serves as a flexible gathering space.
Raised out of the floodplain, the Alief Neighborhood Center and Park also model resilient landscape design after Hurricane Harvey, weaving hardy native planting through a necklace of forested basins that naturally drain the site. Since its reopening, the project has become particularly popular with families, local seniors, and the skating community, who helped design skate park features through multiple workshops with the design team.
Fort Wayne Riverfront
As a city that was built and thrived because of its location as a crossroads between wilderness and city, farm and market, the realities of infrastructure both natural and man-made are at the heart of Fort Wayne’s history. We consider waterways as an integral part of open spaces of the City, forming a series of infrastructural systems that affect the dynamics ...
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...
Hermann Park
Hermann Park is one of Houston’s great civic resources containing a significant urban forest and many public venues. It is the flagship of the Houston Park system, serving the recreation needs of the City’s diverse population of some four million and welcoming over six million visitors a year. However, like many urban parks in America, much of Hermann Park has...
Tangqiao Waterfront Park
The Tangqiao project is located along the east bank of Huangpu River in the city of Shanghai. The project consists of landscape areas in three financial-office parcels and one waterfront park parcel. The view of the site is remarkable, looking toward the landmark skyscrapers of Lujiazui Financial Center, Nanpu Bridge, the Bund, and the future Minsheng CBD.
...