Santa Monica’s famous pier area draws visitors who often disregard pavement boundaries and compact the landscape soil. Palisades Park, adjacent to the iconic pier, is a particularly active site for cyclists and tourists that has long been in need of a planting strategy to discourage pedestrian overflow into the landscape. SWA’s defensive planting strategy tackles this perpetual headache for the City of Santa Monica. Three parcels of land are planted with agave, aloe, and other hardy, drought-tolerant species. The spikey shape of the plants discourages users from treading through the planting area, thereby alleviating the issue of compacting the soil. An existing ficus tree border frames the park, while fencing is strategically employed to keep users off of particularly sensitive areas.
Temple City Playgrounds
Ten miles east of Los Angeles at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, Temple City sought to upgrade its aging parks and existing playgrounds into safe and welcoming spaces for community members of all ages. SWA worked with the city to host a community engagement workshop focused on renovating two city playgrounds: Live Oak Park, the city’s largest park, span...
Shanghai EXPO UBPA (Urban Best Practice Area)
Shanghai EXPO’s Urban Best Practice Area surrounds the Plein Air Museum Park, which chronicles the unique and rich history of the site through objects of art, artifacts, and architecture. The landscape component of the museum park is expressed physically in the form of a Central Park: a gathering space and activity center for the community. The landscape was a...
Guangzhou Guanggang Steel Park
Along the Pearl River, this stretch of Guangzhou’s industrial belt produced steel for nearly seven decades. Following the factory’s decommissioning in 2013, the site has been transformed into a carbon-negative landscape that weaves its industrial past into every design decision. Guangzhou Steel Park reshapes a legacy of environmental degradation into a m...
Tianjin Culture Park
In the strategy for the upcoming integration of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province, the city of Tianjin has been identified as an advanced national manufacture and research base, as well as a core area of international shipping, a financial innovation demonstration zone, and a pilot region for the overall reformation of the area. The location of the SWA-desig...