SWA Group

10/23/2026

This month, the Houston Zen Center announced a major initiative to transform its 40-acre property near Chappell Hill, Texas, a spiritual retreat rooted in native ecosystem restoration. The project also includes strategic renovations to the Center’s two longtime properties in Houston Heights. With the announcement, the Center kicks off a new capital campaign to bring the vision to life, jump-started by a cornerstone contribution of $2 million from the Still Water Foundation.

Led by SWA in collaboration with HR Design Dept and Blackland Collaborative, the Chappell Hill campus is a love letter to Texas’ native Blackland Prairies, an endangered ecosystem, as well as an offering of refuge and replenishment to spiritual groups on the land.

The site was previously home to the Margaret Austin Center (MAC), a retreat center characterized by a series of experimental buildings created by a collective of former architecture students. Embracing these original features alongside the site’s diverse ecosystems—a mix of Blackland Prairie, woodland, and savanna—the plan carefully introduces new structures to minimize disturbance to the existing landscape.

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Houston Zen Center announces the restoration of its 40-acre spiritual retreat center in Chappell Hill and renovations to Houston Heights’ properties Led by SWA in collaboration with HR Design Dept and Blackland Collaborative, the Chappell Hill campus is a love letter to Texas’ native Blackland P...

10/21/2026

Set along the Lagoon in Leo J. Ryan Park, the new Foster City Community Center, designed by Group 4 with landscape architecture by SWA, is envisioned as a social heart for gathering, recreation, arts, and celebration.

SWA’s landscape design extends the Center outdoors through terraces, patios, pathways, and flexible event spaces. Lagoon-facing terraces serve the Event Halls, Senior Lounge, and Café, while Arts and Ceramics patios connect programs to the park. Public terraces cascade toward the Lagoon and waterfront Boardwalk, with rising elevations creating views and spatial separation. A new arrival plaza integrates the relocated Rotary Rose Garden, drop-off, and parking.

A playground, bocce court, and gathering areas support everyday activity, while multi-use parking transforms into a venue for food trucks, markets, and special events. Expanded park walks strengthen connections to Foster Square and surrounding destinations.

The Foster City Community Center opened this fall.

10/19/2026

Success Academy's new K-12 Bronx campus brings elementary, middle, and high school together under one roof in the South Bronx. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the six-story, 310,000-square-foot building gives one of the nation’s highest-performing public charter networks a dignified, aspirational home in a community historically underserved by public infrastructure. The network’s first ground-up campus opened this fall.

Working closely with SOM, SWA shaped the landscape from the ground plane up. The building is set back from the street to create generous plazas and shaded outdoor areas, a significant contribution to a neighborhood with limited public green space. Deep tree pits and sculpted terrain navigate the site’s grade changes, threading greenery through the campus, while a block-long bioswale along the northern setback puts green infrastructure to work. Folding gates tuck into the perimeter walls, so the courtyards can be secured after hours and disappear during the school day.

The landscape continues upward through four rooftop terraces, each tailored to a different age group while sharing a cohesive material palette that complements the building’s green-glazed masonry facade. Stay tuned for a closer look at the terraces.

Congratulations to the Success Academy community on this milestone.

10/15/2026

Transforming the shell of a former Folgers factory into an unexpected setting for education and play, the Frank Liu Jr. Academy for Music & Arts (FLAMA) broke ground on October 8. Located along the Buffalo Bayou East corridor in Houston’s East End, the K-8 charter school was designed by OMA and RDLR Architects, with SWA leading the playground landscape design.

Within the factory’s enclosed courtyard, the playground responds to limited space and a hard industrial palette by replacing the floor with poured-in-place rubberized mounds that form soft, dynamic terrain in radiant shades of orange, ochre, and red. The design complements the geometric forms of the windows above. Oblong planting beds at the courtyard entrance guide students and visitors into the play area, while a mural extends the playscape’s colors onto an adjacent vine-accented wall. The narrow courtyard provides respite from the Texas sun, but its low-light conditions called for SWA to create a unique plant palette.

Rather than rely on conventional equipment, the ground plane itself becomes the play structure, carving out spaces for children to climb, roll, gather, and invent their own uses. FLAMA is targeting a fall 2027 opening.
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Rendering by Out of Ram.

10/15/2026

10/15/2026

On the heels of its LEED Silver Certification, our recently unveiled Piedmont Community Pool has been named a Design Award finalist by AIA East Bay, in their Large Civic category. We’re excited to see what happens at the October 22 awards gala at the David Brower Center in Berkeley. If you’re planning to attend too, let us know!

This project’s lush landscape, grand pool deck, and luxurious seating turn a standard pool visit into something special. A project like this one would be impossible without the vision and dedication of so many stakeholders, which here include municipal officials, community advocates, and project donors.

Kudos to the talented team members at ELS and to our consultant team: SWA Group, BKF Engineers, Aquatic Design Group, Forell Elsesser, Guttmann & Blaevoet, Brightworks Sustainability, SGH, mack5, and Steven Winkel. Special thanks to the City of Piedmont, to its project manager Griffin Structures, and to the general contractor Wickman Development and Construction for getting us to the finish line.

10/12/2026

More than 40 years in the making, Riverside Park South reaches completion this fall. The site was once the New York Central Railroad's 60th Street Yard, and later the subject of a succession of competing master plans. Today it stretches 12 blocks along the Hudson between West 59th and 71st Streets. Designed by SWA/Balsley, the park extends the vision that Frederick Law Olmsted established at Riverside Park to the north. It carries forward that park's curving paths and open meadows and adds a contemporary waterfront that honors the site's industrial past.

Much of the design's challenge lies in the grade change between the elevated Upper West Side and the water's edge, a route that passes beneath the Henry Hudson Parkway. The design embraces the covered condition, using it as a transition zone between upland and waterfront.

That underpass is now one of the most active parts of the park, sheltered from sun and rain. Workout areas, basketball courts, playgrounds, swings, a café, and restrooms turn what could have been residual space into a working part of the park's circulation. It reflects SWA's broader view of landscape as infrastructure: reimagining a structure built for cars as a place for people.

10/09/2026

The deep reds of October Glory maples take center stage at Cooley Court, where autumn color glows against the concrete of Stanford Law School. Two bosques, planted two years before the project’s 2018 completion, now frame the view toward Alexander Calder’s Le Faucon and Hoover Tower, adding depth and seasonal drama to the courtyard.

Renovating the landscape around a 1970s SOM-designed brutalist building, SWA collaborated with TOYA Studio to transform the court into an open, light-filled commons. The project relocated the Calder sculpture, introduced a new paving scheme that resolved waterproofing issues, and added walls that define the trees and courtyard. Today the court serves as a hub for student life and the setting for the law school’s graduation ceremony.

10/06/2026

Geography, history, and industrial memory have shaped Yuzhu, a critical freight harbor on the Pearl River. Yuzhu Riverfront Mixed-Use Development builds on that legacy with a north-south framework: a commercial and retail core anchors the waterfront, while the southern district pairs ecological richness with a high-quality residential environment built around health, activity, and sustainability.

In the northern parcel, a diagonal axis cuts through the site as a direct reference to Yuzhu's former port identity, reconnecting the waterfront as a civic stage and drawing movement into the heart of the development. Four thematic plazas anchor the axis, linked by weathering steel lighting elements that begin as a continuous linear band and gradually dissolve into individual nodes. The progression mirrors the site's evolution, from a singular industrial economy to a layered urban future. Integrated with the paving design, the lighting also works as an intuitive wayfinding system throughout the district.

In the residential parcel, the landscape shifts to an organic matrix of flowing, layered spaces that balance energy and calm. Inclusive in program and generous in scale, these environments serve all ages and draw residents into an active, connected community life.

10/01/2026

Once dominated by heat-absorbing asphalt lots, East Evelyn Avenue preserves the original building pads of a generic 1980s office park while replacing six acres of surface parking with shaded courtyards, pollinator meadows, and outdoor workspaces planted with California natives like toyon, yarrow, and blue grama grass. A network of decomposed granite and cast-in-place concrete paths links office entries to a series of outdoor “rooms” with modular seatwalls, shade structures, and new plantings that triple the existing canopy and require 75% less irrigation than the former lawns.

Working closely alongside WRNS Studio and Rockwood Capital, SWA took cues from the surrounding city grid to craft a fluid experience across the irregularly shaped site, reorienting access points along a central pedestrian spine. Nods to the area’s industrial past appear in a palette of raw concrete, wood, and anodized copper—most visibly in a sculptural trellis that anchors the main plaza.