DETAILS
The World Trade Center Building, also known as Cosmos Tower, is the centerpiece of Cosmos City, a mixed-use development along Osaka’s harborfront. The tower’s base is dedicated to public spaces, including a major retail center that, together with the adjoining Asian Trading Center, attracts visitors, office workers and shoppers. The public open spaces consist of a huge indoor-outdoor atrium space and connecting outdoor spaces that create a park-like setting.
The designer’s greatest challenge was the below-grade slabs and rows of concrete ventilators below. Balsley imaginatively reshaped and incorporated these unsightly intruders into intriguing sculptural features with random perforations that allow light and steam to escape. The concrete ventilators in the North Garden have been transformed into a performance stage structure while the six in the South Plaza appear as cone sculptures. Set in a mist pool and glowing red at night, these distinctive stainless steel cones provide an astonishingly beautiful and mysterious sight that helps to define the street level image and stylistic tone for the entire project.
Giant Interactive Headquarters
We collaborated with Morphosis Architects on a new ecological park and living laboratory for Giant Interactive Headquarters, a 45-acre corporate campus in Shanghai, China. The design concept blurs the distinction between the ground plane and the structure, weaving water and wetland habitats together with the folded green roof of the main building design. The s...
Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel
SWA provided full landscape architectural services for this mixed-use development, which includes a 120-room luxury hotel, five villa residences, a supporting office complex, fitness center, spa and multi-use space. The Sand Hill Hotel and associated offices are nestled onto a dramatic hillside that slopes toward the Santa Cruz Mountains immediately beyond I-2...
Samsung R&D Campus
Comprised of six buildings on two adjacent parcels in the Umyeon neighborhood of Seoul, South Korea, the Samsung R+D design delivers on a complex program requiring a low maintenance landscape that provides restorative outdoor spaces at a variety of scales, visually unity for the campus and an enhancement of safety and security.
Site design focused on th...
Brentwood Town Centre
The Brentwood Town Centre Development Plan will transform the existing suburban-style shopping mall into a mixed-use, transit-oriented community, reasserting itself as the nucleus of the Brentwood Town Centre area. The site will accommodate some 2,000-4,000 high, medium, and low-rise residential units. Its role as a shopping destination will be expanded into a...