News
Photo by Vera Comploj
The Robert W. Wilson Overlook at Brooklyn Botanical Garden has received an Honor Award from the Boston Society of Landscape Architects and a Merit Award from the Perennial Plant Association.
Weiss / Manfredi was the Overlook’s lead designer; Wolf Landscape Architecture designed its plantings, and SiteWorks LLC was the landscape architect of record.
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, Rendering by A\Z Landscape Architecture
Colby College has broken ground on the largest academic building in its history, the 74,000 square foot Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts. The new building will be a hub of student activity, hosting performance areas and studios for music, theater, dance, and film.
Wolf Landscape Architecture’s design will surround the building with outdoor spaces for teaching, performance, and informal gathering. The new spaces will feature meadows, a rain garden, and diverse plant species native to central Maine, helping to connect the building not only to its campus surroundings but to Colby’s natural setting.
Wolf Landscape Architecture teamed with architects William Rawn Associates and civil engineers VHB to make the Gordon Center a sustainable and engaging setting for Colby’s vibrant programs in the performing arts.
At today’s botanical gardens, nature isn’t necessarily “civilized, clipped, and classified,“ writes James S. Russell in The New York Times. “The Brooklyn Botanic Garden hasn’t discarded taxonomic collecting or spectacular floral displays but has steadily brought more of an ecological ethos to its intimate 52 acres. The new plant groupings are comparatively disorderly, host insects and birds, and change constantly with flowers, seed pods, and leaf colors constantly popping and fading.”
The new ethos, he writes, is evident in the “shaggy clouds of vegetation” at the head of the Garden’s Cherry Esplanade, where “a long neglected 1.25-acre slope has become the Robert W. Wilson Overlook. It now hosts a sinuous path lined by white concrete retaining walls. It zigzags up amid a maturing meadow in what look like calligraphic brush strokes.”
On the Overlook’s slopes, grasses and perennials from across North America are assembled based on the layered structure of a meadow, combining their diverse survival strategies to create a resilient plant community.
“Textures and color are subtly enhanced in this meadow,” Russell writes. “Tiny intertwined flowers, leaves and stems hug the soil, including wild strawberries flopping over the top of retaining walls. Mr. Wolf likened the planting idea to ‘very fine threads woven together,’ creating, in effect, small ecological habitats. ‘Even in winter there is an architecture of interlocking plants stems and seedpods,’ he said.”
The Overlook was designed by WEISS / MANFREDI Architecture / Landscape / Urbanism. Wolf Landscape Architecture designed its plantings, which introduce over 40,000 new trees, shrubs, grasses, cacti, and perennials into the Garden’s collection. The project has also been featured in Architectural Digest and New York Magazine.
Upper photo by Brooklyn Botanic Garden; lower photo by Vera Comploj.
Our renovation of the town common in Manchester-by-the-Sea is nearly complete.
The new landscape provides a welcoming stopping place for residents and visitors, complements the town’s historic structures, and improves universal access to the town hall. By replacing asphalt with permeable pavers and reducing the total paved area, it also helps protect the waters of Sawmill Creek and Manchester Harbor.
At the fall Town Meeting, citizens of Manchester-by-the-Sea approved plans to make the Town Common greener and more welcoming. The design by Wolf Landscape Architecture includes realigned walks, ADA-responsive access to the Town Hall’s front door, new benches and lighting, and native shade trees. The landscape’s restoration will be complete in 2020.