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.
RIT Global Village and Global Plaza
Global Village, a pedestrian-only infill neighborhood adjacent to Rochester Institute of Technology’s academic core, and its mixed-use centerpiece, Global Plaza, create a social heart for 17,200 students and 3,600 faculty and staff. The landscape architects and architects collaborated on an urban design that establishes multiple “crossroads” ...
Stanford Branner Hall
Branner Hall is a three-story undergraduate dormitory built in 1924 by Bakewell and Brown, prominent architects of the time who were also responsible for San Francisco’s City Hall. The renovation design creates two significant courtyards: an entrance courtyard flanked with four-decades-old magnolia trees shading a seating area and an interior courtyard with a ...
Stanford Toyon Hall
Toyon Hall, a significant historic building originally designed by Bakewell and Brown Architects in 1922, is a three-story structure centered around a magnificent formal courtyard with arcades and arches. The purpose of the project was to preserve, maintain and enhance the building and site. SWA scope of work included evaluation of existing site conditions and...
Shanghai International Dance Center
Inspired by the idea of movement, this collaboration with Studios Architecture achieves an artful harmony of building with landscape, program with site. The image of a dancer in grand jete kindled the designers’ imaginations and served as the project’s organizing idea. Asia’s first professional dance complex is tucked between a freeway, a subway station...