In California, the best of indoor-outdoor residing has by no means loosened its maintain. Even with ever-pressing environmental points and ballooning inhabitants progress, the dream of a seamless integration between inside and outside continues to captivate designers and shoppers alike. Three current panorama initiatives within the Bay Space display this truth, whereas additionally illustrating the particularities of immediately’s California life-style.
These panorama initiatives, which appeared as case research within the October/November 2022 print version of The Architect’s Newspaper, will run on-line as a three-part collection, the second installment presents an infill panorama for a multifamily housing growth within the coronary heart of Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley has grow to be a flash level for the housing disaster inundating California. Right here, in Sunnyvale, Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW) has designed the panorama for a brand new mixed-income multifamily housing growth. The hearty, hardworking panorama helps weave the undertaking into its context, with terraced gardens connecting the public-facing streetscape to a personal inside courtyard. A vegetated roof deck with territorial mountain views caps the 75-unit growth.
The identify references the stand-alone Denny’s restaurant that beforehand occupied the location and was a group fixture of types. The event welcomed Denny’s again as its anchor tenant, and SAW subtly nodded to the restaurant’s earlier panorama language with a set of palm bushes anchoring the event’s northern, street-facing corners.
Throughout the event, SAW choreographed the plantings to steadiness visible curiosity with the necessity for a low-maintenance, low-water panorama. Deciduous bushes, together with Japanese maples, Shumard oaks, and Western redbuds, dot the courtyard and intensify seasonal adjustments. Reed grasses, sedges, and Douglas irises animate the 2 designated stormwater gardens, with one sited in entrance of Denny’s doing triple obligation as a planter, stormwater retention, and seating. They needed these components to be “a part of the design, not simply civil infrastructure,” stated SAW founding associate and principal Megumi Aihara.
Within the courtyard, SAW integrated hardscape components, raised planters, and website partitions to carve out a collection of outside rooms for residents to make use of for small and enormous gatherings. All through, a design objective was to interrupt down the event right into a collection of smaller areas, giving every space its personal identification with livable out of doors areas. “We’re continuously trying to find methods to handle in a accountable approach the very actual disaster of housing in our state,” SAW founding associate and principal Dan Spiegel provided. “On the similar time, we wish to keep the issues that make residing in California one thing particular.”
Lauren Gallow is a Seattle-based author and editor overlaying artwork, structure, and design with bylines in AN Inside, Dwell, Metropolis, Inside Design, and Cereal, amongst different publications.