Whether or not architecture is an art, buildings and spaces shape daily life. Pushing the boundaries of architecture and the categorization of art, contemporary investigations between disciplines are rethinking tradition. As transformations grounded in human experience, these installations and structures share qualities of purpose, function and creative expression. At the same time, they reorient the limitations and possibilities of each profession.
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Showcasing work that explores the boundaries and potential of architect and artist collaborations, each of the following projects straddle this line. As Camilla Ghisleni has pointed out before, the idea of integration between art and architecture dates back to the very origin of the discipline, but it took on a new meaning and social purpose during the Avant-Garde movement of the early twentieth century. Today, the work expands the definition of architecture to encompass more than buildings, and in turn, broadens our understanding of art.
Art, in general, is produced to be seen or experienced by another, an interlocutor, who, in turn, establishes various relationships with the work. However, this does not appear to be the case with the Bataan Chapel, built by the Swiss artist Not Vital in the Philippines. Punished by constant winds, the work rises on a hill in rural Bagac, a town of just under 30,000 inhabitants located about 50 kilometers west of Manilla. The remote location of the installation makes it difficult to access and makes the journey a task that takes on the air of pilgrimage—part of its grace lies precisely in its inaccessibility.
Ellsworth Kelly died in December 2015 at the age of 92, less than a year after he announced a gift of one of his most lasting creative contributions: plans for the artist’s only building, which had been sitting in his New York studio since 1986. Titled Austin, this 2,715-square-foot work on the grounds of the Blanton Museum of Art on the University of Texas at Austin campus would be his final—and perhaps greatest—effort, an immersive space whose artistic value matches that of the marble panels and sculpture within. Unlike the Rothko Chapel in Houston, in Austin the artist and architect are one, says Carter E. Foster, the Blanton’s deputy director for curatorial affairs.
Gateways was located at the central fountain in Granary Square, King’s Cross. It was designed to celebrate the DesignJunction event, an interior design show by and for the industry, set in challenging industrial sites as part of the greater London Design Festival. The installation was comprised of four bold and unique arches, each characterized by its own profile, patterns, and colors. The four-meter-high arches were clad in vibrant and rich Turkish ceramic tiles designed by artist Adam Nathaniel Furman in collaboration with Turkishceramics. Each of the arches told a different design story.
Korean artist Jazoo Yang completed one of her more iconic pieces, titled “Dots: Motgol 66.” The work covered a home set for demolition in the small Korean village of Motgol, Busan with Yang’s thumbprint. Working for 4-5 hours a day, 3 days a week, “Motgol 66” was the first time Yang was able to realize her project goal, with two previous incidents of homes being demolished early. The work draws attention to the nuances of corruption and apathy in Korea’s housing market. With its economic growth, housing development in Korea continued at an unprecedented rate.
The internationally – and often controversial – acclaimed artist Christo unveiled the “largest indoor sculpture ever made” back in 2013. Prepared to debut in a public exhibition, the inflated “Big Air Package” was designed to occupy a 117-meter-tall former gas tank known as Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany. The 90-meter-high, 50-meter-wide sculpture was made from 20,350 square meters of semitransparent polyester fabric and 4,500 meters of rope, with a total weight of 5.3 tons and a volume of 177,000 cubic meters. The seemingly endless, inflatable installation was conceived in 2010 and was Christo’s first major work after the passing of his wife and artistic partner Jeanne-Claude in 2009.
The highly anticipated “Twilight Epiphany” Skyspace, designed by American artist James Turrell, opened to the public with a sunset light show. The abstract pyramidal structure complemented the natural light present at sunrise and sunset, creating a mesmerizing light show that connected the beauty of the natural world with the surrounding campus. This experience is enhanced by an LED light performance that projected onto the 72-by-72-foot thin white roof, which offered views to the sky through a 14-by-14-foot opening. Additionally, the Turrell Skyspace was acoustically engineered for musical performances and as a laboratory for music school students.
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This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Architecture Without Buildings. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our ArchDaily topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.
Gulf State Park in Alabama is one of the largest public projects to be funded through the Deepwater Horizon settlement. Many more are coming.
The Lodge at Gulf State Park is built directly into the dunes, so when you walk from the parking lot into the spacious lobby, you’re looking straight through the glass back wall of the hotel, across a stretch of white-sand beach, and out into the seemingly endless Gulf of Mexico.
For Alabama, whose precious few miles of beaches all but carry the state’s tourism economy, this was the essential goal of the Gulf State Park Enhancement Project: A view of the sea for visitors and, says Matt Leavell, the director of design and planning at the University of Alabama Center for Economic Development, “an experience of being in the dunes.”
But being in the dunes can mean a lot of things. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan swept across the dunes and destroyed the original lodge, which was built in the 1970s. In 2010, tar balls washed onto the beach as oil gushed from an underwater well operated by BP after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which killed 11 workers. The night before the ribbon-cutting at the new lodge in 2018, as dune-grass plantings were still taking hold, strong winds blew about two feet of sand into an area between the lobby and the restaurant, and crews scrambled to shovel it away before the governor arrived at 8:00 a.m.
“There is something really unique about designing in a dynamic dunescape,” says Kate Tooke, ASLA, a principal at Sasaki, which did the landscape architecture work for the lodge while completing a master plan for enhancements throughout the state park. “Every other landscape you design in, you can sort of assume that the landscape is going to stay mostly where it is. But a dunescape is constantly changing. Dunes are growing, they’re shifting, wetlands are forming, and swales are forming in different places, and that’s part of a healthy dunescape, to have that growth and change over time.”
The Lodge at Gulf State Park was rebuilt as a sustainable tourism destination after a previous lodge, a popular vacation spot, was destroyed by Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Photo by Volkert, Inc., and Forrest Funk Drone Photography.
Gulf State Park was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and opened to the public in 1939. As a culture of beachgoing developed on the Gulf Coast throughout the 20th century, the park became the crown jewel of Alabama’s state park system. The lodge was a rare profit-making amenity within that system, and for years it held the system up, subsidizing the operating losses of the other 20 parks around the state. In recognition of the role it played in that system, the state made plans to rebuild the lodge after it was destroyed in 2004. But it didn’t have a chance to fund the project until after the 2010 spill.
In 2014, a federal judge ruled that BP had acted with “gross negligence” in the lead-up to the spill, and in the years that followed, billions of dollars in settlements and damages began flowing to gulf communities, distributed according to the terms of the RESTORE Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2012. BP settled with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2015, agreeing to pay more than $20 billion to settle environmental and economic impact claims throughout the gulf. But even before that settlement was reached, BP had begun paying out money through the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA), a federal process for assessing the effects of oil spills and other human-made disasters. One billion of those NRDA dollars went to Alabama.
The state spent $1.5 million to launch an early restoration project in 2012, using Christmas trees to stabilize the dunes (see “Christmas on the Beach,” LAM, March 2016) outside the lodge. And in 2014, it launched the $85.5 million Gulf State Park Enhancement Project, with the goals of rebuilding the lodge as “a ‘green’ overnight stay and meeting facility,” according to an NRDA project description. The project incorporated work to restore the dunes, build an interpretive center and a learning center, and improve a network of public access trails connecting a variety of ecosystems throughout the 6,150-acre state park.
To manage the project, the state hired the University of Alabama Center for Economic Development, which turned to Sasaki to lead a master planning effort for the enhancements. Early on, the groups settled on a vision: The park would be “an international benchmark for economic and environmental sustainability demonstrating best practices for outdoor recreation, education, and hospitable accommodations,” according to the master plan. Since then, the project has won a handful of awards for sustainable tourism, including from the American Planning Association, the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, and the Society of American Travel Writers. The lodge has earned SITES Platinum, LEED Gold, and Fortified Commercial certification, and it has become a popular regional conference space; visits to the beach rebounded after a slow season in the wake of the spill.
The lodge was placed within the secondary dune, on the gulf side of the main throughway. Image courtesy Sasaki/Biohabitats.
When I visited in May, Leavell was leading a tour for a group from the Hoover Institution, the right-leaning think tank based at Stanford University, which had been hired to make a report to the Alabama legislature on opportunities for economic growth. The lodge sits on the beach side of Alabama’s Coastal Connection, a five-lane road that passes through the built-up resorts of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach and into the Florida Panhandle 11 miles east. The bulk of Gulf State Park—6,000 acres of wetlands, freshwater lakes, dune ridges, and maritime forest—sits on the other side of the highway. Chris Blankenship, the commissioner of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), carted a group of us around the park in a black Chevy Suburban, surveying the damage and recovery from Hurricane Sally, which hit Gulf Shores in September 2020, and admiring the variety of the landscape.
“It’s a very spectacular coastline,” he said. “I think so many people took for granted the environment and the beach, and when we had something that took that away for a certain amount of time, it created a new appreciation for what we have here—the coast in general, but specifically for Alabama.”
Blankenship helped lead the state response to the oil spill in 2010 and told me that the biggest harm to the state was economic rather than environmental. Early estimates of the spill’s impacts suggested that the state could lose nearly $1 billion in earnings and up to 49,000 jobs. But the size of the settlement was so great that, just a few years later, local news outlets were already asking whether the state’s economy could “gain more from the oil spill than it lost.” In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Alabama had its best year ever for tourism.
When Blankenship became the DCNR commissioner in 2017, he helped settle a lawsuit filed by the Gulf Restoration Network, now called Healthy Gulf, over the use of settlement funds to reconstruct the lodge. The group argued that the project had been on the state’s wish list even before the spill and that it was inappropriate to use NRDA funds to build a private hotel with steep overnight rates instead of on work that would restore public access to the beach and state park. As part of that settlement, the state committed long-term funding to maintain public access to the park.
Jill Allen Dixon, an associate principal and planner at Sasaki who grew up in Birmingham and spent some family vacations at Gulf State Park as a kid, said the key to the plan was respecting the experience that locals and tourists had with the park, while making improvements both for public access and the health of the various ecosystems. Because of its siting, the old lodge had been “a middle finger to Mother Nature,” Leavell told me. But the state insisted that the new lodge be located within the existing building footprint. Working with Biohabitats, a Baltimore-based ecological restoration and design firm, and Watershed, an Alabama-based sustainability consultant, the team spent a lot of time figuring out how best to orient the building both to capture the views of the beach for tourists and leave space for the dunes to evolve naturally. They ended up siting the building on the secondary dune layer, a few feet above near-term projections for sea-level rise, and expanding the number of rooms in the process.
It’s a large park, but the transition from a luxurious beach resort to more rugged terrain happens fast. Families were lounging by the pool at the lodge when I visited in May, and sunbathers were reclining on chaise longues in the sand outside the lobby. Across the road, we drove past a bright-blue wetland lake and a group of newly built cabins, and then rode bikes up to an old dune ridge dotted with swamps. A few years prior, Leavell told me, a woman walking in the park had had her puppy suddenly eaten by an alligator, prompting officials to post new signs warning people to be aware of alligators’ presence. The woman told the local news she didn’t blame the alligator. The sense of a wild landscape right next to a relaxing beach resort was something that residents and visitors had always cherished, Dixon said.
“People already loved what the park had to offer,” she told me. “It was this whole range of experiences, but connected by a theme of connecting with nature, enjoying the natural environment and outdoor recreation.”
The master plan supported different zones for everything from solitary bird-watching to campground concerts.
“There’s a place to be social. There’s the backcountry zone, which is really more of a place to escape and be quiet and enjoy nature in that way too,” Dixon says. “It’s about trying to find those common themes between different perceptions about what connecting with nature means to people.”
Money from the BP settlement is funding shoreline stabilization and ecosystem restoration projects, such as the one above in Bayou La Batre. Photo by Jared Brey.
The morning after the tour, I rode the ferry across Mobile Bay to Dauphin Island, and drove from there to Bayou La Batre, the seafood capital of Alabama. I was aiming for the Bayou La Batre City Docks, a coastal restoration and public improvement project funded with BP settlement money, and the route took me along Shell Belt Road, a small coastal byway strewn with trash and debris that seemed to have been flooded only moments before I arrived. I parked the car next to a large sign announcing the restoration project and walked through a narrow stand of pines to a beach, where plugs of seagrass were newly planted in neat rows on the far side of a riprap barrier. Terns nested on the sand and a reddish egret danced around in a shallow pool of water. Brown pelicans were resting on the rocks, and in my binoculars, through the quivering heat waves, I could see the production platforms of a Chevron refinery across the state line in Mississippi.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the United States, pumping 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of nearly three months before the well was capped. In the aftermath, researchers collected the carcasses of thousands of birds. But many thousands more died in obscurity, sinking to the bottom of the gulf or being unable to escape from predators, said Kara Fox, the director of Gulf Coast restoration for Audubon. Conservative estimates put the number of dead birds around 100,000, but Audubon estimates that more than a million birds were killed as a direct result of the Deepwater Horizon spill.
“Every aspect of the gulf ecosystem was injured by this oil spill,” Fox told me. “There was nothing that was left untouched.”
The deployment of the settlement money—through the NRDA and the RESTORE Act, as well as individual and state claims—is off to a good start, Fox says. Money is flowing to coastal restoration projects big and small, including many miles of new living shorelines and epic sediment diversions in the Mississippi Delta. Those projects will help stabilize coastal areas, protect nesting habitat for birds, and control freshwater flows that were threatening wetland ecosystems well before the spill. The 15-year settlement requires BP to pay out money every year through 2031. But even the record-setting settlement looks small compared to the scale of the gulf and the variety of degradation in coastal ecosystems, both resulting from the spill and predating it.
As Fox said, “This isn’t going to be enough money.”
Much of the settlement money will go to major engineering projects, with a role for landscape architects on projects that involve public access. But even if they aren’t hired to work on all of those projects, landscape architects have been building out the ideas and concepts that underpin them for years, says Gena Wirth, ASLA, a design principal at SCAPE Landscape Architecture. SCAPE is currently leading a $1 million watershed restoration plan for the Carpenter Creek and Bayou Texar watersheds in Escambia County, Florida, funded through the RESTORE Act. Like the Gulf State Park project, the watershed plan is a response to environmental conditions that were degraded well before the BP oil spill and the settlement that’s paying for it, says Lee Altman, SCAPE’s director of design management.
“In response to the oil spill, there’s all of a sudden multiple, huge pots of money that can be applied to projects that were a long time in the making and should probably have been funded beforehand,” Altman says. “We saw a similar pattern with the funding that became available in the Northeast after Hurricane Sandy. So it is really unfortunate that in this kind of world of disaster capitalism, we’re only responding to these major disasters after they happen, and then we remember to go back and look on our shelf for all these amazing projects that have already been developed and never been funded.”
After I left Bayou La Batre I drove down Marine Laboratory Road, aiming for the Grand Bay Savanna Nature Preserve in Mobile County. It was a gravel road through a swampy pine forest, similar to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, near where I live. It brought to mind the Jersey Devil and all the mythical beasts that spring from seemingly interminable landscapes. And then it brought to mind the very real beasts hiding around the gulf: gators and great white sharks, dragonfish and vampire squid, the seeds of tropical storms and the remains of organisms that lived millions of years ago, squeezed into a black ooze at the bottom of the sea. Oil has a natural presence in the gulf ecosystem even in its healthiest places, but humans are perpetually unleashing its destructive potential, whether by spilling it into the water or burning its toxins into the atmosphere. Over the summer a gas pipeline exploded in the gulf, forming a fire-breathing chimera on the surface of the water, and I later read that a Coast Guard official referred to the oil spreading after the Deepwater Horizon disaster by the name Grendel, the cursed monster from Beowulf. I felt a measure of relief when I came across a deep puddle on Marine Laboratory Road and had to turn around. Two months later, Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana.
A variety of ecosystems and amenities are packed into the park’s 6,000 acres. Image courtesy Sasaki.
Gina Ford, FASLA, a cofounder and principal at Agency Landscape + Planning, worked on the Gulf State Park plan at Sasaki before leaving to start her own firm. A few days before I visited the park, she sent me what she called “a little mood deck” with a few slides of her favorite spots in the park. Included was a picture of a bike path on Gulf Oak Ridge, on the far side of the park from the lodge. The path is lined with live oaks, droopy with Spanish moss. Her caption said, “mmmmmm.”
After lunch at the park, Leavell and I rode up to the ridge with Wes Michaels, ASLA, a principal at the New Orleans-based firm Spackman Mossop Michaels, which worked on the enhancement project, and Rebecca Bryant, a cofounder of Watershed. At the top we paused at an overlook and surveyed the expanse of pine forest, the freshwater lakes and the marsh, the faraway pedestrian bridge over Alabama’s Coastal Connection, and the lodge.
When we continued, riding on a boardwalk over one of the lakes, Bryant told me that 10 years earlier she had gone with her young kids to the beach at Gulf Shores on a day when tar balls were washing up on the shore. The older one was angry, she said; the younger one thought it was a game. When it came to planning the enhancements to Gulf State Park, though, there was an opportunity to consider the health of the ecosystem as a whole, rather than just responding to specific harms from the disaster.
“The way the spill itself factored into it was mostly just that realization in the community that the economy is tied to a healthy ecology,” Bryant said. “Obviously that was a wake-up call. And then extending that—not just ecology that doesn’t have oil on top of it, but really a healthy ecology.”
The American alligator is native to the Gulf Coast and is found in groups, or congregations. Photo by Jared Brey.
We were paused at a small lake just off the bike path when Leavell asked the rest of us if we could see an alligator in the water.
“Maybe,” said Bryant, who then continued describing to me the early discussions about situating the lodge. “Because we were doing SITES, that defended the landsc—Oh, that is totally a gator.”
“That is a big alligator,” Michaels said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that big,” Leavell said.
The top of its head was sticking out of the water, wide and craggy, just hinting at the extent of the terrible submerged form.
Jared Brey is a freelance reporter in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the magazine.
As portion of an ongoing energy to make written content more accessible,LAM will be making choose tales obtainable to audience in Spanish.
It’s likely a fantasy of any range of landscape architects: designing an complete community with out owning to consider a solitary motor vehicle. Housing blocks divided not by vast, traffic-choked streets but by light, shaded paseos, or promenades. Flats opening onto European-type courtyards. Every sq. foot of open house devoted to people today.
Kristina Ground, FASLA, is developing that desire. For the past two years, she and her crew at Floor Associates, which is based in Phoenix, have been major the web site style for Culdesac Tempe, a 16-acre, 761-unit mixed-use improvement in Tempe, Arizona, in which non-public autos are prohibited. Produced up of two- and a few-tale apartment structures arranged all over courtyards, the progress has no garages, no “parking podiums”—the latest city do the job-all around that stashes all the parking on the to start with several degrees of an in any other case banal development—and nothing at all you’d even phone a street, which, as it turns out, leaves a lot of home for persons house.
“What occurs on so a lot of tasks, with the total of parking you have to place in, is that most of your landscape is perimeter landscape or parking-whole lot landscape,” Flooring states. At Culdesac, which is underneath building and will open in summer time 2022, Floor says they’re “designing spaces for people today.”
Housing pods are grouped close to shared courtyards that element desert-tailored plants and decomposed granite. The the vast majority of the website is permeable. Picture courtesy Culdesac.
Culdesac Tempe is aspect of a increasing movement amongst metropolitan areas to rethink how much parking they require. New Haven, Connecticut, and St. Paul, Minnesota, each a short while ago voted to eliminate mandatory parking minimums, which have extended been noticed as a hurdle to both equally making reduced-price tag housing and weaning Americans off their dependence on automobiles. And throughout the nation, existing avenue infrastructure is currently being retrofitted to create energetic transportation networks—at good price tag to metropolitan areas. Culdesac signifies an opportunity to layout for car or truck independence from the get-go.
The only auto parking at Culdesac is for the retail and professional spaces. The relaxation of the growth is motor vehicle-free. Image courtesy Culdesac.
Located straight adjacent to a end on the region’s Valley Metro gentle rail line, the improvement will present people a “mobility suite,” together with free of charge limitless rides on the mild rail and subsidized premiums for electric scooters, rideshare, and carshare. The layout, carried out in collaboration with the Berkeley, California-dependent city style firm Opticos, locates retail and industrial makes use of in the corner nearest the rail station (to which a new crosswalk will soon be added) and organizes the web site all-around a central paseo. The paseo winds its way by means of the internet site, connecting again to the bordering avenue grid through a warren of secondary legal rights-of-way.
The consequence is a manufacturer-new local community that feels settled, reminiscent of the centers of more mature European cities, a vibe the design and style group embraced. “The idea was to make it experience like it is been below for a while,” Ground states. This result is partially reached by way of the intensive use of decomposed granite, the hardscape materials of alternative for every little thing from the oasis-like household courtyards to the parking locations for the retail companies. Far more than fifty percent of Culdesac Tempe is open up house, and of that, 85 {6d6906d986cb38e604952ede6d65f3d49470e23f1a526661621333fa74363c48} is permeable. “We have zero asphalt on the overall web-site,” says Lava Sunder, Culdesac Tempe’s common manager.
Landscape also plays a position in wayfinding. Aiding inhabitants and people navigate the community, which has much more than a dozen household “pods” of eight to 10 structures every and no avenue names, was a challenge. “You’re not usually arriving by car, and there is not a front door. It’s obtained a thousand entrance doorways,” Ground claims. “So we had to be cognizant of, how can we help guidebook men and women to wherever they want to go?” In addition to the use of shade and architectural detailing, a plant palette of desert natives (in distinction to a lot more lush plantings in the courtyards) and other landscape cues support denote major circulation routes.
Kristina Ground, FASLA, participates in one of quite a few three-day design charrettes with the Culdesac Tempe crew. Photograph courtesy Culdesac.
These and other concerns have been explored by means of a sequence of charrettes Opticos hosted in Berkeley. The design team sketched, crafted designs, tested strategies. It was an unusually cost-free-form exploration of how a place ought to glance and truly feel and function, without the need of discussions about sq. footage or return on financial investment, Floor states. “I cherished that. I was like, this is how I want to do each and every job going ahead.”
The Sky Area in the new Campus Park recently gained an architectural award from the Albuquerque chapter of the American Institute of Architects Awards Program. Courtesy photo.
The Sky Home amphitheater in Campus Park was regarded by the American Institute of Architects Awards Program’s Albuquerque Chapter on Dec. 3 for its exclusive architecture and obtained the Honor Award, the highest level of award, for architectural achievement and superb merit. The City of Rio Rancho owns the park and Sky Room, which was made by McClain + Yu Architecture and Style. MRWM Landscape Architects developed the landscaping, and SURFACEdesign was the landscape style and design advisor. T.A. Cole and Sons Typical Contractor constructed the Sky Room and park. “In coming up with the Sky Home at Campus Park with the architect, McClain + Yu, our objective was to make an iconic composition that would uniquely characterize Rio Rancho as a neighborhood with its very own cultural identification,” stated Mayor Gregg Hull. Campus Park is a 6-acre multipurpose out of doors accumulating place designed as an exercise hub in Metropolis Heart. Its Sky Space amphitheater is the heart of the space and a hallmark architectural construction that doubles as a work of artwork and house to performances and city activities. “This job would not have been possible without the need of the contributions of our group members, city staff, the Metropolis of Rio Rancho Arts Commission and collaborators this sort of as UNM Overall health Sciences, Hewlett-Packard, the structure team, the contractor and all of the subcontractors from landscaping to drilling to roofing and plumbing and heating,” in accordance to a metropolis information launch. “A formal expression which celebrates the power of a freshly made landmark, the Sky Room Rio Rancho offers a playful and imaginative determine within just the landscape,” in accordance to the AIA Albuquerque jury that selected award winners. “This ingredient is located with the website as a key driver and welcomes attendees in a dynamic fashion, furnishing plenty of alternatives to discover new fascination with subsequent visits. “As a pavilion, each and every celebration is framed in an aperture of fluidity. As a form, it rests inside the undulating context and carves its form from the sky. This project exemplifies the prospective which smaller-scale architecture can have in our landscape. Handful of other tasks explored the connectivity to the surroundings in a method as thoughtful as this undertaking.” The award plan has 4 degrees. The Honor Award acknowledges a challenge with unique character and exceptional merit.
The Fay Jones Faculty of Architecture and Style at the University of Arkansas honored the impressive style and design operate of its alumni in the course of the school’s Winter season Fest Reception and Alumni Recognition Ceremony.
Styles for instructional, health-related, historic, neighborhood, cultural, household, religious, athletic, recreational, hospitality, industrial, corporate and municipal spaces, as very well as city arranging, parks and landscape structure, ended up amongst 55 tasks vying for recognition in the 2021 Fay Jones College Alumni Design and style Awards levels of competition.
Jones, a noted architect, lived most of his childhood several years in El Dorado.
Entries came from Fay Jones School alumni training in metropolitan areas all over the state of Arkansas, as nicely as those people in Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kansas, Texas, California, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and Shanghai, China. An 8-member jury selected 12 projects for accolades — resulting in a person Honor Award, 4 Merit Awards and 7 Honorable Mentions.
Steve Dumez, FAIA, principal of Eskew Dumez Ripple of New Orleans, served as exterior evaluator for the layout awards competitiveness. Jennifer Webb, associate professor in interior design and style, and Gabriel Díaz Montemayor, affiliate professor in landscape architecture, served as jury co-chairs.
Fellow jury users bundled a few school school associates, Greg Herman, associate professor in architecture, Alyssa Kuhns, assistant professor in architecture, and Jinoh Park, assistant professor in interior design. Fay Jones University alumni Ernest Financial institutions, affiliate at Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects, and Carla Chang Mata, associate at Marlon Blackwell Architects, also served on the jury.
“It was a privilege to have the possibility to examine the initiatives submitted by the Fay Jones School alumni,” Steve Dumez said. “Across a broad spectrum of job sorts and disciplines, our jury identified the function executed by the alumni remarkable in both of those its excellent and diversity. The over-all benefit of the submissions represented an extremely significant amount of accomplishment, for which the corporations — and the college — should really be fairly happy.”
As both the College of Arkansas and the Fay Jones Faculty go on to make improved variety, fairness and inclusion a focus and precedence, the faculty also needs to replicate that take care of in the yearly Alumni Structure Awards method. In 2020, the school introduced a new structure group: Community Very good in the Bring about of Diversity, Fairness and Inclusion. This award aims to celebrate and persuade initiatives that have interaction with minoritized and/or low-cash flow communities via the style and design and creating of architecture, interiors, and/or landscapes that mitigate deficits and inequalities in housing, training, tradition, well being, other general public companies, general public and/or group spaces, landscapes and/or infrastructure.
“The high-quality of operate rising from our a lot more than 3,000 powerful alumni only carries on to deepen, to develop and to be of greater reward to the communities in which our alumni are positioned, below in Arkansas, regionally and nationally,” said Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones Faculty. “This design excellence spans all of our design disciplines and concentrate regions — in inside design, in landscape architecture, in architecture, in neighborhood design, in regional arranging. We are grateful for the prospect to realize this sort of excellence and this sort of community commitment our alumni are exemplary, inspirational versions for our college students as they glance ahead to their personal professions.”
Tony A. Patterson (B.Arch. ’20) and Jason M. Ward (B.Arch. ’97) won an Honor Award for Kol Rinah Synagogue in St. Louis, Missouri. The style team is with Patterhn Ives, LLC, in St. Louis. The style and design of the Kol Rinah Synagogue respects and honors the loaded heritage of a just lately unified Jewish religion congregation, while on the lookout towards the long term with optimism and hope. A new limestone addition containing a sanctuary and entry was meticulously joined to a completely renovated 1950s era church and college constructing. Acoustics, substance and light-weight are very carefully composed to build a heat, tranquil house inspiring contemplation and spirituality. The architecture and landscape attempt to build a dynamic natural environment for a assorted and inclusive community, serving 3 main features: gathering, finding out and prayer.
“Its variety and resources are pretty pretty,” the jury claimed. The jury also mentioned “a potent nevertheless easy use of material and light” in this project, and emphasised the “supplemental virtue in its variety, equity and inclusion target.”
Tony A. Patterson (B.Arch. ’20) also won a Benefit Award for the HBCU Outreach Middle in Sikeston, Missouri. The project was also regarded as a style for Public Good in the Trigger of Range, Fairness and Inclusion. Patterson is with Patterhn Ives, LLC, in St. Louis. The HBCU Outreach Middle serves as a catalyst for community revitalization, offering accessibility to schooling, social programs, local community gardening and an out of doors classroom, when strengthening community connectivity through strategic backlinks to a increasing network of trails.
“This constructing employs a refined use of sort and content to develop terrific spaces for the local community,” the jury explained. “This is a terrific challenge that has sizeable and varied programming, each indoor and outside, addressed in a pretty concise manner.”
Mason Ellis (B.Arch. ’06) received a Benefit Award for Cane Hill Presbyterian Church in Canehill. Ellis is with WER Architects in Small Rock. Crafted in 1891, the church underwent a entire historic preservation and restoration. The bell tower and stone foundations were being repaired, a wooden shingle roof was installed, and the initial Gothic arch transom was uncovered and restored. The interior was absolutely restored to its initial visual appeal, like salvaged wooden flooring.
The jury located this challenge to be “an exceptional instance of Historic Preservation.”
Reva Meeks (B.Arch. ’08), Tanner Weeks (B.L.A. ’98), Jon Raney (B.L.A. ’04), Alison Jumper (B.L.A. ’98), James Birke (B.L.A. ’12), Jenny Burbidge (B.L.A. ’10) and Shannon Norman (B.L.A. ’09) received a Benefit Award for Osage Park in Bentonville. The design staff is with Ecological Design and style Team in Very little Rock. Osage Park is an urban park in Bentonville with a path and boardwalk system that weaves in the course of assorted landscapes, immersing guests within just their natural surroundings. Its preserved and enhanced wetland procedure functions as a “comfortable infrastructure” that soaks up and filters stormwater — slowly and gradually releasing it, decreasing flooding downstream, and improving upon drinking water high quality.
“A wonderfully executed challenge with an ecological foundation and regenerative overall performance delivering a significant-high-quality general public space,” the jury reported. “This job does its best to improve what is by now there and displays reverence to mother nature and its features.”
Chris Baribeau (B.Arch. ’03), Michael Pope (B.Arch. ’10) and Jody Verser (B.Arch. ’10) gained a Benefit Award for Osage Park Pavilion in Bentonville. The layout workforce is with Modus Studio in Fayetteville. The Osage Park Pavilion is the centerpiece of a 55-acre prairie wetland maintain on the northern end of an airport. It derives its sort and structural expression from plane wing style, lifting seamlessly out of the floor and evolving into a light-weight, airy structure that celebrates natural light-weight.
“The pavilion superbly integrates with the landscape, also component of the more substantial venture, and its physical and cultural placing,” the jury claimed. “The enjoy of light-weight from equally inside and out is very interesting.”
James Sullivan (B.Arch. ’07), Jonathan Opitz (B.Arch. ’03), Kyle Heflin (B.Arch. ’15) and David Cowan (B.Arch. ’73) gained an Honorable Mention for ASC ARTS x3 in Pine Bluff. The design and style workforce is with AMR Architects, Inc., in Tiny Rock.
Landon Shockey (B.I.D. ’01) and Mark Weaver (B.Arch. ’82) received an Honorable Mention for Astral Spa at Oaklawn Vacation resort in Warm Springs. The style and design staff is with HBG Layout in Memphis, Tennessee.
Chris Baribeau (B.Arch. ’03), Michael Pope (B.Arch. ’10) and Jason Wright (B.Arch. ’04) gained an Honorable Mention for Coler Mountain Bike Protect in Bentonville. The structure team is with Modus Studio in Fayetteville.
Sarah Bennings (B.Arch. ’04) won an Honorable Point out for Little Rock Southwest High Faculty in Tiny Rock. Bennings is with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects in Minor Rock.
Chris Baribeau (B.Arch. ’03), Leanne Baribeau (B.Arch. ’04), Elisha Cantrell (B.I.D. ’06), Kiara Luers (B.Arch. ’16) and Suzana Annable (B.Arch. ’12) won an Honorable Point out for Ozark Pure Foodstuff Co-Op in Fayetteville. The design crew is with Modus Studio in Fayetteville.
Matt Maranzana (B.L.A. ’97) won an Honorable Point out for Riverfront Fort Wayne – Promenade Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Maranzana is with Lamar Johnson Collaborative in St. Louis.
Tim Maddox (B.Arch. ’02) and Seth Spradlin (B.Arch. ’15) received an Honorable Point out for Willis Home in Fayetteville. The style crew is with DEMX Architecture.
As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible,LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish.
Angular and lean, the new St. Pete Pier in St. Petersburg, Florida, folds its way for 1,380 feet from land to water. Under a bright, hot sun, even 10 feet may be just a few too many, Alternative Medicine.
The pier’s many shifts, crossings, and cantilevers, made possible by more than 400 concrete pylons, make the journey seem rather effortless, however. This new addition to St. Petersburg’s urban infrastructure is more of a networked arrangement of spaces than a single object, the latter a fatal flaw that compromised the previous pier and contributed to its obsolescence and eventual demolition.
Subtle transitions allow the new pier’s architecture and landscape to take turns and communicate in a cohesive language while surfaces move up and down and laterally in plan and section. The roughly 3,000 feet from the beginning of the Pier District, which begins downtown, to the Pier Head building at the end aren’t all visible at once. Instead, the trip is divided into a series of manageable segments with plenty of respite along the way. Residents and tourists of all ages move along shared walks that begin with gateway elements consisting of an elaborate pergola, an outdoor market, and mature plantings preserved from the previous pier. Visitors quickly transition from downtown speed to park speed. Free trams share a curbless space and pass by varied programs that promote buy-local culture, public art that changes dramatically at night, sculptural play areas that integrate earthwork with native plantings, and a central civic plaza whose grand expanse and water features accommodate programming large and small.
New restaurants and pavilions allow one to pause, eat, listen to live music, people watch, get close to the water, and maybe even help sample it and learn something new about the bay at a nonprofit-run ecological discovery center. The broad palette of experiences leads to the Pier Head, where fishing is allowed and where beer is served (and in demand)—even on Mondays at 11:00 a.m.—at the rooftop bar. One may, in fact, decide to never get to the Pier Head, and the experience would not be the lesser for it given all the new options.
The integrated plan mixes plazas, buildings, canopy structures, and native trees and vegetation throughout. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
The attraction to and reliance on the edge where land meets water in Tampa Bay was reinforced by St. Petersburg’s original urban plan, which made the pier’s importance to the city both crucial and inevitable. The first platted plan of the city, drafted in 1888, shows broad 100-foot-wide rights-of-way, organized into a regular grid that covered about two-thirds the size of New York’s Central Park in an urban plan that one would have expected for a much larger city. The only interruptions to this rectangular order were a lake, a park, and a pier.
Reservoir Lake, later known as Mirror Lake, provided the city with an essential spring-fed water supply. Williams Park, initially a wily vegetated grove named after one of the city’s founders, became the urban center. The crisp geometry of a single pier, prominently shown in the 1888 plan with its cardinal axis running east–west, however, underscored its importance as an essential artery connecting city and bay. The built structure jutted 3,000 feet into the water and carried the city’s first rail cars. The eponymous Railroad Pier lasted more than 50 years until it was torn down in 1952. Six other piers followed, each with its own claim to St. Petersburg history and identity, before today’s Pier Park opened on July 6, 2020. As a prominent symbol since the city’s founding, it’s difficult to think of St. Petersburg without the pier and the pier without St. Petersburg.
The city’s subtropical surroundings at the time of its founding also played a role in its urban form. The dense ecologies of saw palmetto, slash pine, and cabbage palmettos nearby, and the irregular, water-filled pockmarks of a karst landscape only a few miles away, looked nothing like the city’s Cartesian plan. To city founders who came from as far as St. Petersburg, Russia; Detroit; and Philadelphia, the urban plan must have conveyed an aspirational stability that augured a prosperous future where its connection to the water would be essential. Both Pier District design teams incorporated some of these native ecologies and geomorphologies into their plans, not only to ensure the landscape’s longevity in a tough coastal setting, but also to celebrate it as part of the city’s regional identity.
Former parking lots are now the setting for native plantings that are resilient and representative of the region. Photo courtesy W Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
The Pier District, which is composed of the new Pier Park fronting Tampa Bay and the Pier Approach that leads to it, begins at the eastern edge of Straub Park, a leafy, 10-acre greenway that houses the city’s Museum of Fine Arts and sits on the edge of the city’s downtown waterfront. The Pier District creates a series of interconnected outdoor spaces where the public has an opportunity to speed up, slow down, and stop. The linear experience that one would expect from any other pier is instead one of ample diagonals, grade changes, and shifts in framed views that expand the experience in every direction.
All age groups, ethnicities, and athletic inclinations seem comfortable here. Despite the many activities and people that the Pier District accommodates, the presence of security staff and other public safety accoutrements that are part of almost every public space today seem to fade to the background. Couples lean against one another to catch water views, wedding tents are assembled and disassembled, grandmas keep a watchful eye on nearby tricycles, young parents seem to have enough room to let kids run around without major consequences, and they all seem to fit right in without getting in each other’s way at a destination that asks for no reservations or entrance fees. The district seems to provide for everyone and is a welcome counterpoint to the quiet and more traditional if soporific Straub Park that frames its entrance. Having had an opportunity to experience St. Petersburg before and after the new pier, its social, economic, and environmental center seems to have shifted east toward the water with this new destination.
In 2014, Ken Smith, FASLA, and Rob Rogers, the principals of New York-based Ken Smith Workshop and Rogers Partners Architects + Urban Designers, respectively, teamed up with the Tampa office of ASD | SKY to enter the competition to replace the previous pier with their winning Pier Park design. The second key part of the Pier District plan was the 20-acre Pier Approach, led by Barbara Wilks, FASLA, the principal of W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, also based in New York. Wilks, who teamed up with St. Petersburg’s Wannemacher Jensen Architects, connects the city’s edge to Smith’s and Rogers’s Pier Park to the east. The complementary projects transform the Pier District and render it unrecognizable from its former self.
Early iterations of the pier tried to balance the recreational and the functional. Though it met the practical needs of accommodating the flow of goods as part of the city’s first rail line, the pier and its waterfront quickly became a place for leisure. Postcards memorialized the pier’s bathhouses, ballrooms, recreational fishing decks, and civic events that welcomed thousands and defined the St. Pete Pier as a reliably exciting destination. The recreational amenities eventually edged out the loading docks and warehouses, even if the needs of rail cars and private vehicle access remained.
Versions of the pier have come and gone, celebrating the spirit, economic aspirations, and technologies of their time. Hundreds of incandescent lights earned the Electric Pier (1906–1913) its name. The open-air deck of the Million Dollar Pier (1926–1967) fit thousands and served as the setting for lavish celebrations. The Inverted Pyramid (1973–2013) that preceded today’s Pier Park was boldly iconoclastic, designed by the architect William Harvard to maximize unobstructed water views at the ground level, much like the Pier Park design team would be expected to do nearly 50 years later.
Ken Smith Workshop’s Tilted Lawn folds the park’s topography to create a 360-degree vantage point; its sculptural oculus casts dynamic shadows below. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
An open ground plane was an aspiration that ran its course at the Inverted Pyramid. The temptation to clutter it with kiosks, signs, vehicular access, parking, fish-cleaning stations, and retail proved too hard to resist. What was once a striking architectural object slowly became crowded by a collection of smaller things at its base. Its story is perhaps cautionary given the propensity to look at the open space around carefully designed architecture as low-hanging fruit for misguided retail retrofits. The harsh and unforgiving marine environment took its toll on the Inverted Pyramid soon after its construction, requiring ever-increasing upkeep that created ongoing structural and financial challenges despite renovations. As iconic as the Inverted Pyramid was when it was first built, it slowly became the proverbial cake left out in the rain that no amount of marketplace consulting could save. It was demolished in 2015.
The design of the two new projects—the Pier Park and the Approach—that together make the new St. Pete Pier District was the result of two different selection processes that took place at different times after a previous competition faltered. In the end, the 20-acre Pier Approach cost $20 million, and the 12-acre Pier Park cost $56 million, with a total price tag of $93 million that included ancillary projects such as new seawalls and underground utility infrastructure for the district. Together, the Pier Approach and Pier Park create an armature of spaces that is a departure from the historic linear pier’s singular axis.
The success or failure of an undertaking of that scale and civic import would predictably depend on the ability of potentially disparate landscape teams to work together. Both design teams underwent a rigorous and extended review process with heightened public scrutiny given the history of a previous pier competition, which granted a unanimous win to Michael Maltzan Architecture in 2012 but eventually rejected it in 2013 by community referendum. Given that false start, whatever came from a subsequent competition would likely be seen as a vindication or a fool’s errand.
Janet Echelman’s Bending Arc hangs gracefully above the karst-inspired landscape below it. Photo courtesy Brian Adams/Studio Echelman.
The integration of substantial public art components, the largest of which was Janet Echelman’s Bending Arc, with an impressive footprint of nearly 50,000 square feet, came after schematic plans were completed for the Pier District. The challenging chronology hardly matters now, judging from how seamlessly the sculpture is integrated by the W Architecture and Landscape Architecture team. Colorful Adirondack chairs are moved about the space below it, and circular berms rise and fall subtly from the lawn to become seating, karst-inspired land art, and unintentional bicycle ramps that probably weren’t expected to be among the mix of planned uses.
Echelman’s ephemeral net hangs delicately overhead, its changing shadows casting softly on the ground during the day and its dramatic colors shifting spectacularly at night. The sculpture was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s words “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and refers to the role of Spa Beach (on the Pier District’s northern edge) in the 1957 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the rights of all citizens to use the beach without discrimination. The pier’s symbolic and literal embrace of inclusivity mirrors the city’s advances elsewhere on this front given the discriminatory legacy of its waterfront parks and piers. The Million Dollar Pier and thousands of green benches that were once a part of St. Petersburg’s public landscape, for example, were unwelcome symbols of segregation to its Black citizens. Now, for the first time in the city’s history—more than 100 years—two Black women are serving on St. Petersburg’s city council, and the St. Pete Pier has become a proud symbol of inclusivity for the city.
Bending Arc references the city’s struggles with civil rights and Spa Beach’s role in a Supreme Court ruling that favored nondiscriminatory use of public space. Photo courtesy Brian Adams/Studio Echelman.
W Architecture and Landscape Architecture’s Pier Approach strives to create spaces for all, and the project carefully integrates public and vehicular access to parking areas that are accessible yet largely screened from view. The Pier Approach project includes a stormwater management strategy that overlays paths, bridges, swales, and ponds to encourage wandering and exploration, a cantilevering pedestrian deck where egrets, herons, and ducklings can now be observed, and a popular shaded playground that is nested into a berm and, judging from the decibels of a few site visits, is quite successful. New shade elements are most dramatically on view at the entrance Market Plaza and Pavilions, where a solar canopy defines the space. Existing oaks that suffered through years of soil compaction in the former parking areas are given a new life on the north side of the Pier Approach, where a ferry terminal is planned. Large circular retaining walls protect their roots while doubling as seat walls. The Pier Approach sets the stage for Pier Park to the east while keeping the consistency of the rugged material palette of concrete, metal, wood, and native plantings of both projects and the geometry of diagonals that links them.
Pier Park’s winning move to eliminate cars from the pier was a bold departure from all previous pier iterations. Highly controversial, the move nearly caused the team to be eliminated, they said, and the risky decision was berated by the public for being insensitive to visitors looking for easy access to the Pier Head. “The tram was a good response to that…it was complicated to figure out how to not have curbs [for fire trucks and emergency vehicles] and make it feel narrow and shared,” says Ken Smith. “[The city] did have a design to put a traffic circle,” adds Wilks. “Luckily it was also more expensive.” The other two finalist schemes [ALMA/Alfonso Architects, Inc., and Destination St. Pete Pier/St. Pete Design Group] both kept cars.
The central plaza’s fountain faces the Tilted Lawn and provides ample gathering areas with several access points to the pier. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
While the convenience of being able to drive to the end might seem like an obvious advantage, it would have meant negotiating and interrupting an otherwise panoramic experience of the water, free from the unpredictability of drivers. The argument for cars is hard to understand today when one sees people of all ages using the entire length on weekends and weekdays and exceeding all expectations of user counts. “We forget how much we have advanced in the last six years societally about cars and shared spaces,” says Rob Rogers. According to City Architect Raul Quintana, Pier Park is on track to far exceed the Inverted Pyramid’s visitation record, with almost 69,000 guest visits during opening week alone and despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges.
The beginning of the pier where the ground starts to peel up and over Tampa Bay is anchored by a space called the Tilted Lawn, which has a dramatic oculus cutout and a grouping of large, hand-operated umbrellas. The lawn accomplishes multiple goals through its monumentality. Not only does it elevate the ground plane to create a vantage point in an otherwise flat surface that defines most piers (and Florida), but it is large enough to accommodate the oculus whose shadows animate the space underneath throughout the day and create one of the pier’s more dramatic if minimalist stopping points. As the backdrop of two fountain splash pads with angular shapes that rise from the ground to the west, the Tilted Lawn works at the urban scale of the pier’s central plaza by creating an edge that complements a broad flight of stairs leading to Spa Beach to the north, a restaurant pavilion to the west, and a vegetated area known as the Cultural Grove to the south. The water features serve as playgrounds as well as angular geometric forms that foreground the horizon and serve as a counterpoint to the billowing passing clouds. When dry, the fountains become land art, their long triangular forms tapering to the ground. The exterior faces of the fountain’s perimeter berms are pigmented to define the grade change around them, which creates a noticeable boundary that highlights their footprint and provides a visual cue for the downslope that helps people navigate its edges.
Beyond the central plaza, Ken Smith Workshop’s overwater planters called Coastal Thickets on the northern edge of the pier provide a dramatic and refreshing pause that immerses pedestrians in native ecological habitat. Consisting of four 30-foot-wide segments that stretch for almost a quarter mile, the elevated (and labeled) planting beds constructed on structure over water incorporate a zigzag path that at times extends over the edge and provides another key vantage point to view the city and understand the ecology of the region. Had they been smaller, perhaps they would be more vulnerable to the elements, but their sheer scale has so far ensured a lushness whose green is a pleasing contrast to the pier’s many concrete surfaces.
At the Pier Head, the building at the very end of the St. Pete Pier designed by Rogers, a 30-foot cantilevered roof floats over an equally large terrace as if it were an urban-scale porch that serves as lookout, event space, and dining destination. The building accommodates a breezeway and stairs in the middle of the core, which lets in a constant breeze. The structure prioritizes panoramic views to both bay and city, east and west, and slightly twists its axis to emphasize a wider view that doesn’t just look back at the pier’s main alignment but includes views of the beach to the north and a broader swath of a city that is now Florida’s fifth largest since its founding more than 130 years ago.
The Pier Head building relies on a relationship to the lawn and event space at its base to complete the experience of the pier’s terminus. Fishing now happens on a generous deck on the east side of the building—an improvement from the previous pier, where visitors had to dodge anglers and stomach fish-cleaning stations before arriving at the end. Together, the landscape of the ground plane at the Pier Head creates flexible open spaces that can accommodate a few dozen or a few thousand.
Unlike previous iterations of the pier, the complementary language of landscape and architecture contends with the threats of climate change and storm surge while providing ample space for public gathering, whether it faces city or bay. Along the north side of the pier, a breakwater reef structure made of native lime rock and oyster shells dampens the erosional effects of onshore wave action and allows the natural formation of a sand beach. In a place where hurricanes continue to shape the ecologies and landforms of the region and are capable of carving gaps in barrier islands like one did in 1848, the new St. Pete Pier sets a standard for resilience in one of its more visible and popular public spaces. A prominent emblem of 21st-century urban infrastructure, the St. Pete Pier embraces the city’s primordial connection to the water as an opportunity and looks to shape the future of the region and beyond for many years to come.
Spaces leading up to the Pier Head include a low central fountain, the Coastal Thickets overwater planters, and the Tilted Lawn. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
Ken Smith, FASLA, Ken Smith Workshop
“I love all the big moves that we did, but what really makes them work is paying attention to the grading. I did most of the grading on the site, and I did it several times because it kept changing over time. When I’ve been teaching and practicing, it’s very common for landscape architecture practitioners to say grading is a real art form, and I believe that. Engineers do functional grading, but landscape architects do grading that is actually expressive of place. At St. Pete, the landscape is flat, so we had to pick up the grade a bit because the new pier is lifted up higher than the old pier for sustainability and storm surge reasons. We had a landform that is one elevation, and we had to lift the pier up to a higher elevation, so part of the plaza and the Tilted Lawn is about how you lift that up and do it in a way that is actually interesting and really expressive of creating spaces. It’s a little bit weird, but I was thinking of the French garden and André Le Nôtre, who would lift up terrains to change your perspective and perception of space.”
Barbara Wilks, FASLA, W Architecture and Landscape Architecture
“I’m really proud that we saved almost all of the trees and they are sitting in a landscape and really look like they belong there. We built an oak pine forest that is one of the habitats of Central Florida. We had a lot of pine, which people seem to like; providing that landscape was a nice contrast to the mostly hardscape of the pier, and people seem to enjoy it.
I’m pleasantly surprised that people adopted it. The client called and said they are doing drum circles on the lawn! It’s great as a landscape architect to design a place that people respond to and enjoy. The sculpture had a lot to do with it. We got people to the water’s edge—that was a big one. Combining the two sections and creating the circulation pattern that fit Rogers’s scheme, I think we did a good job on that. It really all works as one thing.”
Project Credits
Client The City of St. Petersburg, Florida.
PIER APPROACH
Prime Consultant W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Brooklyn, New York. Architect of Record Wannemacher Jensen Architects, St. Petersburg, Florida. Civil and Structural Engineers Kimley-Horn, St. Petersburg, Florida. Playground Consultant Earthscape, Wallenstein, Ontario, Canada. Lighting Consultant/Structural Engineer for Art Arup, New York. Electrical Engineers and Security VoltAir, Tampa, Florida.
PIER PARK
Design Architect Rogers Partners Architects + Urban Designers, Houston and New York. Executive Architect ASD | SKY, Tampa, Florida. Design Landscape Architect Ken Smith Workshop, New York. Executive Landscape Architect Booth Design Group, St. Petersburg, Florida. Lighting Design Renfro Design Group, New York. Design Structural Engineering and Marine Engineering Thornton Tomasetti, Tampa, Florida. Structural and MEPS Engineering TLC Engineering Solutions, Tampa, Florida. Civil, Marine, and Environmental Consultants Stantec, Tampa, Florida. Coastal Engineer Humiston and Moore Engineers, Naples, Florida. Geotechnical Engineer Terracon, Tampa, Florida. Fire Protection and Life Safety Code Consultant FP&C Consultants, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri. Environmental Permitting Landon Moree, Palm Harbor, Florida. Construction Manager Skanska, Tampa, Florida.
Roberto J. Rovira, ASLA, is a landscape architect and educator based in Miami, where he chairs the landscape architecture program at Florida International University and runs Studio Roberto Rovira.
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