Situated within Foshan’s emerging art district near the Nanhai Art Center, Poly VITA reimagines high-density residential living by drawing from the spatial traditions of Lingnan water town culture. The design translates the layered, processional quality of classical southern Chinese gardens into a contemporary community landscape, moving residents through a sequence of art-infused spaces from the public edge to the intimate residential core.
A looping trail system doubles as required fire access while connecting exercise stations, contemplative gardens, and children’s play areas throughout the site. Rather than treating safety infrastructure as a constraint, the design integrates it into a continuous recreational path that threads together the community’s activity nodes.
At the heart of the development, a sculptural pavilion inspired by Lingnan tea house architecture anchors a gently bermed amphitheater, offering flexible space for daily use and larger community gatherings. Surrounding gardens draw on regional cultural programs, incorporating native species — Albizia falcataria, Terminalia mantaly, and Sweet Osmanthus — to reinforce a sense of place while mitigating urban heat island effects.
Custom paving patterns reference the Poly brand identity, marking arrival moments at building entries, while a layered lighting program featuring sculptural installations extends the landscape’s utility into the evening hours.
Senayan Square Apartment Towers
An upscale complex of four apartment buildings in downtown Jakarta catering to visiting executives and their families required landscape design services to ground two recently constructed towers. Providing inspiration for enriching this flat, undifferentiated site were the country’s ubiquitous, terraced rice paddies, located just beyond the city’s border. The ...
SunCity Takatsuki
Located in a bedroom community midway between Osaka and Kyoto, this facility has both Assisted Living and Skilled Nursing levels of care. The landscape design, complementing the modernist architecture, is organic and fluid with meandering paths traversing various gardens on the south side of the building connecting feature terraces located at each end of the b...
Larkspur Courts
SWA was hired to help reclaim an abandoned quarry into an attractive residential village. The program called for 256du on 12.5 net acres, a density of 2.5 du/acre. The City of Larkspur required that 97 of the total units be family units. They defined family units as residences with two or more bedrooms and located not more than one level above grade. The City ...
Envision Willowick
The Cities of Garden Grove and Santa Ana are developing a “vision” for redevelopment of the Willowick Golf Course site. This process explored conceptual land use options that are formed by community and stakeholder collaboration and input. The Visioning is intended to be used to guide the preparation of development plans for Willowick. The visioning...