Since 1975, the Norton Simon Museum has anchored a stretch of Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard as a defining cultural institution in Southern California. Its sculpture garden — designed by Nancy Goslee Power and modeled after the gardens at Giverny — has long shaped how visitors experience the museum, offering a quiet, green threshold before stepping inside.
In connection with the museum’s 50th anniversary, SWA worked alongside Architectural Resources Group on a renovation that reconsiders how visitors approach, enter, and move through the campus. Focusing on the museum’s perimeter landscape and arrival sequence, the team resurfaced and realigned sculpture garden paths, enhanced and replaced planting, added new perimeter fencing and gates, updated entrance grading and paving, and improved ADA-compliant routes throughout. The design also limits the impact of extreme heat; large canopy shade trees create obstacles to surface warming over hardscape and streets, while permeable paving absorbs rainfall in areas of regular precipitation.
The result preserves Power’s original structure and intent while improving circulation and accessibility—strengthening the landscape as both a threshold and an extension of the museum experience itself.
California Academy of Sciences
One of San Francisco’s first sustainable building projects, the California Academy of Sciences supports a stunning 2.5-acre green roof. Emphasizing habitat quality and connectivity, the project has received two LEED Platinum certifications.
The building’s architectural team, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), invited SWA Group and horticultural c...
National Civil Rights Museum
Located at the Lorraine Motel—site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968—the National Civil Rights Museum serves as both a national institution and an international destination for reflection and remembrance. Led by Howard+Revis in collaboration with Self+Tucker and SWA, the west campus landscape design represents a return to a s...
Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art
SWA was selected to provide design services for the new Modem Art Museum of Fort Worth located across the street from the renowned Kimbell Art Museum designed by architect Louis Kahn. The direction for the landscape concept here evolved from the vision of Japanese architect Tadao Ando, whose design was selected as the winning entry in an international invitati...
Coda at Tech Square
The Coda building in Technology Square represents a $375 million investment into Atlanta’s budding innovation district – the Southeast’s premier innovation neighborhood. The area has attracted industry innovation centers including AT&T Mobility, Panasonic Automotive, Southern Company, Delta Air Lines, The Home Depot, Coca-Cola Enterprises, NCR,...