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.
Uptown Commons
SWA was tasked with creating a neighborhood gathering space and exterior dining hall that is an exercise in contradictions — open and welcoming, while able to be walled off. By blending urban planning, landscape architecture, interior design, and architecture with an understanding of retail real estate, the team was able to quickly establish development yields...
Avenida Houston
For many visitors, the George R. Brown Convention Center serves as Downtown Houston’s gateway. Ahead of hosting the Super Bowl, city officials sought to transform the convention center’s uninspiring eight-lane drop-off into a pedestrian plaza for civic enrichment, art, and leisure. SWA took on this ambitious 140,000-square-foot redesign, converting five city b...
Santana Row
SWA provided full landscape architectural services for the development of a neo-traditional town center near downtown San Jose. The client’s vision called for a variety of design styles to create a town center with an impression of growth over time. This theme is expressed in building elevations as well as landscape design. The restaurants and boutique r...
Pearl River Tower
Pearl River’s 70-story tower reaches a maximum height of 309.4 meters and is an exemplar of self-sustaining, high-performance, environmentally intelligent architecture. The project’s landscape design reinforces the principles of sustainability and zero-energy usage accomplished by the building’s siting, architecture, and engineering. It creates a v...