SAW weaves a landscape into a multifamily housing development

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 in and out continues to captivate designers and shoppers alike. Three latest panorama initiatives within the Bay Space show this truth, whereas additionally illustrating the particularities of at the moment’s California way of life.

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 sequence, the second installment presents an infill panorama for a multifamily housing growth within the coronary heart of Silicon Valley. 

Silicon Valley has change into 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 mission into its context, with terraced gardens connecting the public-facing streetscape to a non-public inside courtyard. A vegetated roof deck with territorial mountain views caps the 75-unit growth.

The title 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 wished these parts to be “a part of the design, not simply civil infrastructure,” mentioned SAW founding companion and principal Megumi Aihara.

Within the courtyard, SAW included hardscape parts, raised planters, and website partitions to carve out a sequence of outside rooms for residents to make use of for small and enormous gatherings. All through, a design aim was to interrupt down the event right into a sequence of smaller areas, giving every space its personal identification with livable out of doors areas. “We’re always looking for methods to handle in a accountable manner the very actual disaster of housing in our state,” SAW founding companion and principal Dan Spiegel supplied. “On the identical time, we wish to preserve 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.