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.
Q: How did you get involved in landscaping the grounds around, at least for now, the world's tallest tower?
A: Three years ago, I got a call (from Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Burj Khalifa's architect) saying, "can you take the first plane out to Chicago?" ... The prior concept was a plaza with some water in it, very corporate. We had four weeks to come up with a new design, then we presented it to the chairman of Emaar Properties (the developer) and he loved it.The next six months, we were busy like crazy.
Q: Towers like this make news because of height. How do you make the ground matter as well?
A: My responsibility as a landscape architect is not just to make something green, but to create a sense of connection that extends into the neighborhood and the community. Our landscape basically is a park, one that serves as a connective tissue. ... Dubai is hot and sandy, everything's brown, so we want to be green and cool with lots of shade.
Q: How is your work pertinent to San Francisco, which doesn't have buildings of this scale and where everything is packed together?
A: I love San Francisco and our urban fabric. The challenge here is, how do you design a tower so it has (public) space that invites people in and offers relief.
Source:
San Francisco Chronicle
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