WORKSHOP:KEN SMITH LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

WORKSHOP:KEN SMITH LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

WE ARE COMMITTED TO CREATING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL SPACES THAT MATTER... AND IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF URBAN LIFE.

WE ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR CHALLENGES THAT MAKE ADIFFERENCE.

WORKSHOP: KEN SMITH LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

WORKSHOP: Ken Smith Landscape Architect, P.C. is an award-winning design firm with experience in a wide variety and scale of projects.

The firm practices landscape design primarily in the realm of public space, with an emphasis on creating landscapes that are original, artful and expressive. Typical design problems involve making landscape space within the context of existing, reworked or complex urban fabric. This requires a strategic approach in making the strongest conceptual landscapes within the limits and possibilities of the site’s infrastructure, context and program. This has led to pushing beyond traditional landscape typologies of plaza, street, and garden to conceptualize landscapes that are hybridized from diverse traditions and influences of the contemporary culture.

Experience and experimentation are combined with the goal of producing landscapes of the highest conceptual and artistic quality. Emphasis is placed on providing personal service and addressing landscape problems, which require special effort. Each site, program and client are dealt with individually, giving attention to developing solutions specific to the project.

East River Waterfront Esplanade - New York, New YorkKen Smith Landscape Architect has been working as part of a multi-disciplinary team on a two-mile stretch of the East River Waterfront in Lower Manhattan, starting with master planning and continuing with full project design for the public esplanade and open space improvements. The complex site sits partially beneath the elevated FDR Highway and partially over water on marine platform structure. The goal of the project is to provide a continuous public esplanade for bicycles and pedestrians, improve connections to the adjoining neighborhoods and provide needed open space amenities. Features include two landscaped recreation piers, a dog run, fishing balconies, exercise platforms, swings, overlooks and an innovative mussel habitat demonstration area, aka “Mussel Beach.”

The project has been designed and constructed as a phased development. The initial construction for the ‘pilot project’ was completed in 2010 followed by package 2 completed in 2012. Packages 3 and 4 are currently under construction.

Fulton Stre

et

Ca

therine

Stree

t

Package 2

Package 2

Package 1Pilot Project

Package 1Pilot Project

Package 4[in design]

Package 4[in design]

Package 3[in

construction]

Package 3[in construction]

Pier 35 BasketballPetanque

Mussel HabitatExercise

Get DownFishing Balconies

Skate ParkExercise

BleachersUrban Swings

Pier 15Pavilion

Dog RunGet Down

Get DownBike Path

TFANA Arts Plaza - BAM Cultural Arts District - Brooklyn, NYThe TFANA Arts Plaza is an entry plaza for The Theater For A New Audience, which is a new theater building in the BAM cultural arts district in Brooklyn New York. The principle features of the plaza include a grove of Locust trees with integrated sub grade soil cell planting system and pervious concrete paving for storm water infiltration. Plaza paving is composed of bands of pervious concrete and Mt. Airy white granite exposed aggregate concrete paving separated with curvilinear bands of brushed stainless steel. The paving bands are continued into the theater lobby to integrate plaza and building experience. Custom banquette seat rings were fabricated for the project to provide convivial social seating.

The Elevated Acre - New York, New YorkKen Smith Landscape Architect collaborated with architects Rogers Marvel for the redevelopment of a sterile 1970s-era public plaza located atop a parking structure 30 feet above the street. The new design envisioned the space as more of a lush green park than hard plaza. The challenges of the site were many. The design improved the stair/escalator connection to Water Street and created new visibility for the space with a prominent light beacon located above South Street. A new sequence of spaces was created to support a variety of public needs and activities including quiet places to enjoy the view with comfortable seating, a large terraced space with open lawn for performances and organized events, spaces to eat lunch, and a series a planted dunes that speak to the site’s proximity to the waterfront and the New York Harbor.

Since the entire site was constructed over structure the landscape was designed to be lightweight enough to meet the engineered load, yet lush enough to be satisfying as a park. The design vocabulary is rooted in an abstraction of the terminal moraine topography that historically typified the geology of the area. The ground plane of the site was sloped up to create a new horizon line with a series of landscape “dunes”. The design manipulates perspective with the sloping ground plane initially obscuring the view of the East River and the Harbor. As people move up the slope and through the dunes, the horizon gradually opens up to the East River and the graceful span of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Harbor are dramatically revealed.

Santa Fe Railyard Park - Santa Fe, New MexicoKen Smith Landscape Architect collaborated with architect Frederic Schwartz and artist Mary Miss on the redevelopment of derelict old railyards into a major new public park. Santa Fe is known for its multicultural history, which reaches back several centuries with its adobe architecture and its historic plaza. In the nineteenth century, it was also a railroad town, a less well-known chapter that left a significant imprint on its urban fabric.

The Railyard Park is part of the redevelopment of the historic train yards near the downtown core of the city. The 13-acre space includes a plaza, alameda, sophisticated water-conservation features, open spaces and park features. The park was conceived as a set of park-wide systems defining program, plantings, water harvesting and circulation, all integrated with the overall design of park spaces and features. The alignment of historic rail lines and sidings provide the spatial structure of new park pathways linking history with contemporary use.

One story the park tells is of scarce water and of how the shared stewardship of that resource builds community connections. In New Mexico, people have historically made landscapes by first finding water and then stewarding this precious resource. This tradition is manifest in the preserved and still active section of the 400-year-old Acequia Madre that runs across the site. Adjusting grades to create water catchments throughout the park along with improving soils were fundamental to capturing and holding water onsite and creating good growing conditions for park plantings. Throughout the park, water is captured from neighboring roof areas, stored, and used as a visible element in the park landscape. A water tank in the new plaza is the central storage component for harvested water. This water supports xeric plantings, native grasses and garden environments that shape the public spaces of the park.

Village of Yorkville Park - Toronto, OntarioThe idea of this one-acre urban park dates back to the late 1950s when a block of Victorian-era row houses were demolished along Cumberland Street to allow for the construction of the Bloor Danforth subway line. The park sits at the cusp of two neighborhoods; the small-scale old Yorkville neighborhood with its late 19th and early 20th century row houses, and the high rise commercial core that has built up along the Bloor Street corridor since the subway opened. The community wanted a park that reflected the scale and context of the neighborhood, incorporated the native ecology of the surrounding region, and made connections with the circulation of local streets and a system of mid-block passageways. My strategy for the competition was to design the park to express the Victorian style of collecting. In this case, we were “collecting” landscapes of Ontario—pine groves, prairies, marshes, orchards, alder woods, rock outcroppings and so on—and arranging them in the scale and pattern of the nineteenth century row house lot lines.

The park design creates a series of linear subdivisions with contextual alignments to the building lot lines across the street and connections to mid block passageways in the adjoining blocks. Each linear park segment is distinct in character but related to the next, creating a park of diversity and unity. To anchor this space with a an element of regional glacial geology, we arranged for a large 700-ton bedrock outcrop of native Muskoka granite to be taken apart along natural crevices, moved 150 miles south and reconstructed on site. Immense yet inviting, the outcrop has a wonderful tactile surface for sitting—and it absorbs warmth on cool sunny days. Moveable tables and chairs next to the boulder offer a nice contrast between permanence and flexibility.

While small in size, Yorkville’s park has become a local landmark, and has played an important role in the revitalization of the neighborhood since its completion in 1994. I’ve been back to visit a number of times in the following years. The park is popular and well used. Recently, the park underwent some restoration work, but its original design integrity as a distillation of regional ecology, along with its role as a neighborhood connection point, remain as strong

Croton Reservoir Treatment Plant - Bronx, New YorkKen Smith Landscape Architect is part of a multi-disciplinary design team working with multi-agency clients to plan and design public amenities and sustainable landscape features for a large water treatment plant in New York City. The complex site includes program requirements for functional aspects of the treatment facility, security requirements, public access, parking, public golf driving range and a clubhouse that sit over the nine-acre sub-grade treatment structure. A stormwater system collects runoff from the large roof structure and provides phyto-remediation in a series a treatment cells that ring the driving range as well as storage for clean water to be reused for irrigating the on-structure driving range. An emphasis has been placed on designing a public demonstration of best practices for storm water management while creating a facility of innovative and distinctive design. Green roof plantings for the driving range cover a nine-acre roof over the below grade treatment plant. Weight limited all soil depth to 10-inches and use of stuctural grade foam to create topography.

The golf driving range replaces a similar public facility that was displaced by the new treatment plant and responds to neighborhood concerns that the site be returned to its original grades and use.

This project is a good example of the contemporary trend of multi-use infrastructure with a strong component of public space and sustainability programmed into a large scale project. The driving range design represents a best practice appraoch toward site sensitivity and sustainable systems.

The MoMA Roof Garden - New York, New YorkKen Smith Landscape Architect designed an art-oriented roof garden for the new Taniguchi-designed addition to the museum. The museum was required to provide a “decorative rooftop” to ameliorate the view of the new building’s roof from the adjacent condominium residences of Museum Tower. The design of the roof garden appropriates the visual vocabulary of military camouflage to create a garden that simultaneously disguises the roof while making it highly visible. The design also provides commentary on the nature of landscape with its manipulation of scale and use of natural and simulated materials. Limited load conditions and policy direction to have no maintenance or irrigation led to a material palette of recycled rubber chips, crushed glass, crushed marble stone, artificial boulders and artificial boxwood shrubs.

P.S. 19 Schoolyard - Queens, New YorkLocated in Queens, P.S 19 was a pro bono design project for the Robin Hood Foundation’s Library Initiative. The project was conceived as a set of five prototypes, each addressing a typical schoolyard problem: the forbidding schoolyard fence, ubiquitous asphalt paving, lack of furnishings, lack of greenspace and lack of space for kids and classes to gather together for reading and learning. The project is filled with common materials used in new ways, such as a long “cloud scrim” panorama printed on easily replaceable industrial fabric, which raises the eye to an always-blue horizon that’s visible from both the street and inside the garden. Small brightly painted dumpsters were fabricated for use as planters to create small school house gardens. In the first phase, we applied bright round graphics to standardized steel temporary classrooms. Using similar polka dots of color, we rolled out a “graphic carpet” on the pavement incorporating reflective glass beads like those used in city crosswalks to add sparkle to particular areas of the pattern.

Glowing Topiary Garden - New York, New YorkOne of Ken Smith’s first realized public projects in New York City was a two-month temporary installation at Liberty Plaza in the Financial District. Designed to bring color and light to dark winter nights, this garden transformed an ordinary hardscape plaza into an ephemeral winter oasis offering the calm of a Zen monastery garden and the sculptural precision of French topiary. Installed in time for the 1997 winter solstice, the Glowing Topiary Garden lasted through the brief winter holiday season, bringing mystery and pleasure to the shortest days of the year. Ken Smith collaborated with lighting designer Jim Conti, the first of our many partnerships since then. We placed sixteen 16-foot tall cones over the existing grid of “lollipop” mercury vapor lamp posts in the plaza. For a sense of focus, we sited one 24-foot tall cone at the center. We added colored fluorescent bulbs to the base of the topiary cones, creating the effect of white light at the top of the cone and colored light at the ground. Although the cones and lights were stationary, the movement of people walking through the space added vitality of movement and randomness. As they walked and explored, visitors experienced spatial shifts in color and sound moving from east to west, and north to south. Eight of the cones near the installation’s center were equipped with electronic sound devices creating an acoustic space. In addition, we placed 250 wind chimes throughout the canopy of locust trees to create air music for a pervasive soundscape effect.

Orange County Great Park - Irvine, CaliforniaKen Smith led a multi-disciplinary team that won a major design competition in 2006 for the reuse of 1,348 acres of the decommissioned El Toro Marine Corps Air Station as a metropolitan park serving the southern California region. The design team prepared a full master plan and comprehensive park design for the project. The project emphasizes sustainability at a large scale, making social spaces that promote community and health, and connections to regional identity and a sense of history.

KSLA was also responsible for the design of early activation park improvements including the Preview Park with its orange observation balloon and the Western Sector Park Development Plan with its Farm and Food Lab, Community Gardens, Kids Rock play environment, Palm Court Arts Complex and North Lawn Soccer Fields. The Palm Court Arts Complex is located within the site of the earliest Marine Corps squadron unit, built in 1943. The bow-truss historic hangar along with two flanking historic warehouses have been restored and adapted for contemporary use as an arts complex. The landform between the two warehouse structures was holistically raised to eliminate former loading docks and create a continuously accessible multi-use site with iconic palm grove.

A Sycamore allée and history timeline along with strong grading forms give scale and dimension to the large spaces of the soccer fields. Pedestrian bridges cross bio-swales providing access to the site and simultaneously giving visibility to the sustainability program in the park’s design. Shade structures provide enclosure to the site and frame views. A series of landscape terraces give structure to an outdoor performance space. Designed landscapes simultaneously define human scale spaces within the park and open up and frame views to the larger landscape beyond.

Anaheim Packing House District - Anaheim, CaliforniaThe Anaheim Packing District is a three-parcel site with two significant historic buildings, part of the Colony Historic District in Anaheim, the oldest city in Orange County, California. The Packing House, built in 1911 is the last remaining packing house in the city and was originally home to the Sunkist Company. Built at the edge of downtown Anaheim and alongside the Southern Pacific rail line, the Packing House is listed on the National Historic Register.

The 1925 mission revival Packard Building is considered a locally significant historic structure originally designed as a car showroom. Both the Packard Building and the Packing House are reminders of Southern California’s agricultural and transportation heritage as well as prime examples of the mission revival architectural style that were popular in Southern California at the time.

The empty lot between the two buildings was redeveloped along with the two historic structures to create a unified three-block park, retail, restaurant and market oriented district that is part of the City of Anaheim’s master plan for revitalizing the downtown area of the city. Ken Smith Landscape Architect collaborated with a multi-disciplinary design team, retail developers and city officials to create an urban district that preserves the historic structures while making adaptive reuse improvements and creating a landscape-oriented setting linking together indoor and outdoor use areas. The team worked closely with historic preservation consultants and SHPO (State Historic Preservation Office) officials to sensitively integrate new uses into the historic structures.

The design and material vocabulary of new improvements emphasizes durable historic materials such as wood, steel and concrete. A historic rail spur was recreated and two flat bed cars were installed in a historically correct location to be used as outdoor dining

Park Avenue Terrace - New York, New YorkThis site is a small 7-meter by 9-meter terrace garden on the 39th floor of a Park Avenue tower in New York City. The garden is composed of a series of sculptural planters on wheels that negotiate the site’s constraints with a flexible design that accommodates movement and change. Allowing for on-demand reconfiguration, every element is movable due to the building’s window washing equipment requirement that the terrace be cleared of all furnishings four times a year. This also allows for the client’s desire to change the garden adapting to varying social uses ranging from intimate family dinners to large parties or simply the desire to change the view. The owner travels frequently to Asia and collects scholar rocks and is interested in plants. The design is a modern interpretation of an old courtyard tradition of viewing and strolling garden with a collection of plants. The garden minimally consists of five sculpted planters with multiple planted openings, a patterned garden carpet, lighting elements and furnishings.

Pacific Coast Residence - Laguna Beach, CaliforniaThis is a redesign of 1980’s terraced landscape for an existing residential property in Southern California. The garden sits between a street front garage at the top of the property and the house, which sits at a lower elevation facing the Pacific Ocean.

There is a nine-foot grade change between the garage and the house, which the elderly clients traverse daily. The program called for a new hand rail, better lighting along the path way and for a distinctive garden that would function as part of their art collection. The sculptural hand rail was custom fabricated and incorporated a linear LED light for night illumination. The railing rigorously follows the vertical dimensions of the steps and landings for functional purposes but is freer and more expressive in form in its horizontal curves.

WORKSHOP: KEN SMITH LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT450 W31 STREET • 5 FLOOR • NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10001

212-791-3595 • INFO@KENSMITHWORKSHOP.COMWWW.KENSMITHWORKSHOP.COM

WWW.BEHANCE.NET/KENSMITHWORKSHOP