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 centerpiece of the resulting design is a stacked garden with indigenous plantings arranged in straight and curvilinear strips that link to the already developed area. The new garden’s 15-foot range in elevation functions on several levels: it offers improved views for those strolling through, provides the more intimately scaled spaces expected in such high-end residences, and hides mechanical services for a new swimming pool underneath its form. The garden’s terraces descend to a stepped waterfall that fills a replica of the swimming pool anchoring the other end of the property. Connecting the four-tower cluster along the site’s outer edge is a stone path flanked by palm trees and lush foliage that serves as a buffer against the noise and pollution from a large adjacent road.
Revisiting SunCity Kashiwa
Elderly residents at SunCity Kashiwa are no longer at a loss for dinner conversation: an underutilized terrace outside their extensive ground-level common spaces now features a dramatic pond and mountain-inspired rock formation with multiple cascading waterfalls. Everyone wants a window seat. The striking water feature crowns a new four-season view garden desi...
Fuzhou Vanke City
The Yongtai project, located inside the Red Cliff Scenic Area, borders the Dazhang River and consists of a 45-hectare watershed area surrounded by 12 small hills. It features a boutique hotel, a shopping street, clubhouses, residential high-rises, townhouses, and detached homes. The overall project plan calls for housing clusters that follow the natural site t...
Bamboo Grove Residence
Boasting premium views of the Jialing River, this development is divided into three residential parcels of different sizes and a commercial district with a sales center at its center. Unique topographical conditions for each parcel include, in one instance, a more than 40-meter grade change. The design responds to the natural topography of the site, using runo...
Zobon City Villas
SWA provided landscape architectural services for this residential condominium site in Shanghai. The open space layout is comprised of three gardens, each creating a unique environment for the tenants. The Huangpu Abstraction garden is the public face of the project and is expressed with a 2.5m tall stacked glass fountain. The Sky Garden is the center piece of...