SWA’s master plan for the three Nordic Events venues—the Ski Jumping, Cross Country Skiing, and Biathlon stadia and courses—honors the natural beauty of a spectacular Olympic Winter Games landscape as never before. The venues were originally slated to be located in separate valleys, requiring athletes and spectators to travel from site to site. But in PyeongChang, SWA departed from that logic and instead took their cues from the landscape itself, resulting in the most compact design in Olympic Winter Games history. Locating all events in one valley achieved two goals: creating the most efficient, exciting experience for both athletes and visitors to the Games, and disturbing the region’s steep terrain and pristine pine forests as little as possible. In PyeongChang, pedestrians flowed along a continuous promenade between these venues, saving hours of shuttle bus time while also being immersed in a high-octane sports experience. The arrival sequence to the Ski Jumping Stadium is choreographed to build viewer excitement, where a plaza is flanked by three practice jumps, the monorail that transports athletes, coaches and officials to the tower and Large Hill and Normal Hill in-runs, and the Ski Jumping Stadium itself. Created for Korea’s 2014 Olympic Winter Games bid, summers also bring an active site, with an 18-hole golf course, roller-blade training, and soccer pitch replacing the snow sports.
Atherton Civic Center and Library
The vision for the Atherton Civic Center landscape is a community space set in a peaceful garden, designed to enhance the local ecology and mitigate the urban impacts of the new development. The landscape design integrates new architecture into the wider Atherton community through a strolling garden approach to site circulation. The planting areas are comprise...
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
This office building’s roof garden celebrates a potent image of the native Texas landscape: the level, grass-covered plains emerging from a wooded riparian area. A design vocabulary of native, drought-tolerant plant materials, especially selected to react to light and air movement, reinforces this design approach. The project serves as a two-acre rooftop garde...
Luohu Station
Luohu Land Port and Train Station is a border control area and the busiest place in Shenzhen, China. As such, the city was faced with the challenge of moving as many as 600,000 people per day and determined to build a subway. Under the auspices of the Shenzhen Municipal Planning Bureau, a team of consultants from eight different countries worked together on th...
Rio 2016 Olympic Park Competition
SWA was awarded 2nd place in the 2016 Olympic Park Competition in Rio de Janeiro for their master plan and landscape architecture proposal. The Olympics will be located on a 118-hectare site in the neighborhood of Barra da Tijuca. The underlying concept of ‘Embrace’ weaves through the design in a grand planning gesture, which both defines the Olympic Games and...