SWA Group of Sausalito designed the park at the base of the Burj Khalifa.
There's a local angle to Burj Khalifa, the 2,717 -foot tower that opened on Monday in Dubai: The 27 acres around it were designed by SWA Group, a 150-person landscape architecture firm based in Sausalito. John Wong of SWA has specialized in the bases of cloud-popping icons for the past decade, and the San Francisco resident talked with Chronicle Urban Design Writer John King about coming into this job when the core of the tower already was approaching 2,000 feet - and the relevance that such projects have for a city like ours.
