SWA Group

SWA Group SWA is a long-standing, employee-owned collective of eight independent studios practicing landscape architecture, planning, and urban design.

Recognizing extraordinary achievements in design and advocacy across the Asia-Pacific region, IFLA APR’s Landscape Archi...
12/05/2025

Recognizing extraordinary achievements in design and advocacy across the Asia-Pacific region, IFLA APR’s Landscape Architecture and Luminary Awards honor a suite of projects each year that make outstanding contributions to environmental and civic life.

This year, SWA Shanghai received two such awards:

🏆 Award of Excellence, Parks & Open Space (Built) – Guangming Trail
🏆 Outstanding Award, Parks & Environmental Projects (Unbuilt) – Litou Mountain Park

Guangming Trail, stemming from a 2016 public health policy known as Healthy China 2030, carefully weaves a series of elevated trails and bridges across mountainous, forested topography. Three unique bridges distinguish the greenway: the first, a series of floating rings embedded with solar technology; the second, a playful, netlike platform; and the third, China’s first stress-ribbon pedestrian bridge saddled across a valley.

Similarly, the vision for Litou Mountain Park navigates the steep terrain of Guanlan Forest, siting a series of sport and play areas, overlooks, lawns, bridges, and pavilions just north of Shenzhen’s urban core. Drawing inspiration from the fashion industry that defines the adjacent town of Dalang, SWA’s design borrows metaphors—tailoring, sewing, draping—to shape programmatic areas and introduce sculptural elements resembling needles and threads.

Congratulations to the teams, clients, and collaborators for each. Learn more:
https://www.iflaapr.com/award/ifla-apr-la-luminary-awards-2025-winners-and-jury

Landscape architects are exceptionally good at envisioning future conditions. But when it comes to low-carbon design, ou...
12/01/2025

Landscape architects are exceptionally good at envisioning future conditions. But when it comes to low-carbon design, our field is still learning how to translate long-range scenarios into immediate, quantifiable choices—materials, maintenance, and more—that meaningfully shrink the carbon footprint of a firm’s portfolio over time.

This November marked a year since the release of SWA’s Climate Action Plan—the first released by a major landscape architecture firm. Over the past year, our Climate and Sustainability team has worked across studios to turn ambitious targets into day-to-day practice. Rather than claiming to have all the answers, our new series, The Low-Carbon Landscape, reflects on what’s working, what’s surprising, and where uncertainty remains, in order to share lessons and spark dialogue across the profession.

In this opening piece, Director of Climate Strategy Jonah Susskind looks at the CAP’s core ambition to cut the carbon footprint of our built work by 50% by 2030, raising a question both deceptively simple and critical: 50% of what?

🔗 Read more: https://www.swagroup.com/stories/establishing-a-carbon-baseline-in-landscape-architecture/

11/21/2025

ELS has just won another Citation Award from AIA East Bay, for our in-progress Memorial Park Aquatic Center & Master Plan, designed in association with SWA Group. Working closely with city officials, we have focused on upgrades that retain what people love about the park while carefully inserting a top-tier, culturally vibrant center for recreational and competitive aquatics. The project is currently under construction and set to open next year.

Congratulations and thanks to our client, the City of Santa Ana - Municipal Government, our partners at Swinerton Management & Consulting, our consultant team, and our ELS team.

Tucked between two hills in Shenzhen’s Luohu District, Honggang Park weaves over 80 acres of open space through one of t...
11/20/2025

Tucked between two hills in Shenzhen’s Luohu District, Honggang Park weaves over 80 acres of open space through one of the city’s densest neighborhoods. Now completed, with Phase II opening this summer after Phase I's January opening, the park offers a continuous green corridor that links city life with nature.

Celebrating the site’s stark topography, SWA’s design carefully threads hiking trails along the slopes to minimize ecological disturbance, with stairs providing shortcuts along switchbacks. Altogether, the plan adds or preserves over 5,000 trees, reinforcing the park’s role as an ecological and recreational anchor for the district. At either end of the park, sweeping views of the city and surrounding mountains can be seen from elevated plazas, with irrigation and security systems discreetly tucked out of view.

Read more about the project in Metalocus:
metalocus.es/en/news/green-corridor-connecting-two-urban-hillsides-hong-gang-park-swa

At its core, design for sports facilities is about creating symbiosis between gathering spaces—often monolithic and mass...
11/13/2025

At its core, design for sports facilities is about creating symbiosis between gathering spaces—often monolithic and massive in scale—and their context. Today, this presents a volume problem.

In 2024, MLB attracted over 71 million in-person spectators, NFL games brought nearly 19 million fans, NBA arenas reached 98% capacity, and the Paris Olympics sold a historic 12 million tickets. With crowds this large, entertainment districts across the globe are more strained than ever, but also suffer as economic dead zones during periods of dormancy.

Over decades of experience, SWA’s work has transformed fortress-like environments into active destinations that absorb the intensity of game day while functioning year-round as fully integrated neighborhoods. Divided into three overlapping categories—Districts, Stadiums, and Civic projects—these case studies showcase a range of landscape and urban design-driven approaches to sports venues, large and small.

At their largest scale (Districts), major complexes flow into the cities around them, extending into retail, dining, live performance, and residential corridors with a unified identity. At a closer view (Stadiums), landscape serves as the connective tissue between large structures and their immediate surroundings, creating porous edges and spatial logic that reduce crowd friction and logjams, doubling as high-performance urban parks and plazas on off days. Finally, at a community scale (Civic), sports facilities are reimagined as resilience hubs during hurricanes and heatwaves; cultural centers with intergenerational amenities and programming; and straightforward spaces for everyday training supported by elegant, light-on-the-land design.

Read the full story:
https://www.swagroup.com/stories/sports-and-entertainment-districts/

We’re honored to share that UCSD Theater District Living and Learning Neighborhood—a collaboration between HKS, EYRC, Ki...
11/11/2025

We’re honored to share that UCSD Theater District Living and Learning Neighborhood—a collaboration between HKS, EYRC, Kitchell, and SWA—received not one but four honors at the 2025 Design-Build Institute of America National Awards.

Recognized for its student-centered design, emphasis on wellness, and progressive design-build delivery, the project received:

🏆 Award of Excellence in Education
🏆 Best in Design in Architecture
🏆 Best in Teaming/Leadership
🏆 National Award of Merit for Educational Facilities

Navigating the pandemic, supply chain volatility, and a student housing shortage, the project rethinks density and student life without sacrificing quality or long-term maintainability—incorporating shared spaces like meditation pavilions, tea houses, dining areas, and rooftop meeting centers that encourage connection among students, faculty, and visitors.

Congrats to the full team! Read more: https://dbia.org/project/university-of-california-san-diego-theatre-district-living-and-learning-neighborhood/

We're proud to share that three SWA projects were honored in the Engineering News-Record West Awards. In Northern Califo...
10/27/2025

We're proud to share that three SWA projects were honored in the Engineering News-Record West Awards. In Northern California, San Bruno Recreation and Aquatic Center won Best Project in the Sports/Entertainment category, and 1265 Borregas earned an Award of Merit for Office/Retail/Mixed-Use. In Southern California, UCSD Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood received two Awards of Merit, for Higher Education/Research and Excellence in Sustainability.

In ENR's Global Best Projects Awards, 1265 Borregas also won Best Green Project.

Winners were profiled in the October print issue of ENR California, now live, and will be honored in award ceremonies in Los Angeles and San Francisco next week.

SWA wishes you a joyful Diwali and a prosperous New Year!
10/20/2025

SWA wishes you a joyful Diwali and a prosperous New Year!

Join us in celebrating the 10th anniversary of Buffalo Bayou Park, which opened in October 2015.For most of the 20th cen...
10/16/2025

Join us in celebrating the 10th anniversary of Buffalo Bayou Park, which opened in October 2015.

For most of the 20th century, Houston turned its back on its primary waterway, treating Buffalo Bayou as little more than a drainage channel even as the city grew and flooding concerns mounted. That changed in 2010, when the Kinder Foundation gave the Buffalo Bayou Partnership a $30 million catalyst gift to transform 2.3 miles of the bayou into civic green space.

Today, the two-and-a-half-mile park’s system of paths, bridges, and varied destinations connects to a growing regional trail system, anchoring Houston’s public realm while connecting downtown to adjacent neighborhoods. It also plays a central role in the city’s resilience to more frequent and intense rain events—strategic design decisions allowed the park to weather multiple major flood events since its opening, and the project has served as an international case study in how flood infrastructure can also serve as park space.

Beloved features include opportunities for boating and cycling, pedestrian bridges, nature play and trails, a skateboard park, a dog park, a restaurant, performance venues, and an immense underground cistern reimagined as an immersive art space. At dusk, residents and visitors amass to watch over 200,000 Mexican free-tailed bats emerge from beneath Waugh Drive Bridge, stippling the night sky.

It’s an understatement to say SWA is proud to have shaped a project so integral to Houston’s civic life, thanks to decades of advocacy and collaboration that continues today.

10/14/2025

This summer, the Ballona Creek Bike Path Extension—a long-anticipated project to close a decades-old gap in Los Angeles’s seven-mile bikeway and pedestrian corridor—secured $6.4 million in funding from the California Transportation Commission (CTC) in a unanimous vote. Designed by SWA in partnership with nonprofit advocacy organization Streets For All, the project will extend the path nearly two miles to the east to Venice and Cochran, getting people from Mid City to West LA and the beach on a car-free path.

Combined with prior commitments from the Southern California Association of Governments (S**G), the City of Los Angeles, and the Culver City - Local Government, a total of $7 million has now been secured to advance environmental clearance and technical design work, bringing the project to shovel-ready status.

Hear from SWA Co-CEO Gerdo Aquino, Councilwoman Heather Hutt, and Founder and CEO of Streets for All Michael Schneider on how the project was revitalized. Learn more about the project: https://www.swagroup.com/stories/ballona-creek-bike-path-extension-approval/

Special thanks to the Cities of Culver City and Los Angeles, former Culver City Mayor Thomas Small, Supervisor Holly Mitchell, the Baldwin Hills Conservancy (Urban Watersheds Conservancy), City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering, LADOT Official, Metro, S**G, and CTC.

10/09/2025

Since opening in late 2024, River Street Marketplace has become one of Orange County’s most beloved destinations. SWA led the site’s rezoning and planning process over nine years to align the design with community values and San Juan Capistrano’s historic, agrarian character.

Gravel pathways, native plantings, and shaded courtyards evoke the area’s rustic heritage, while flexible outdoor spaces invite dining, play, and informal gathering. Reclaimed wood and materials were sourced within 300 miles of the site in Los Rios, reducing embodied carbon and deepening the project’s connection to place.

The final design, developed in collaboration with RSM Design and Bickel Group Architecture, is a community hub that feels both historic and new—grounded in the rhythms of local life, celebrating California’s oldest neighborhood while adapting for its future.

We’re proud to share that Park WellState Nishiazabu was honored in this year's Senior Housing News Architecture & Design...
10/09/2025

We’re proud to share that Park WellState Nishiazabu was honored in this year's Senior Housing News Architecture & Design Awards!

The project—a 36-floor, 421-unit tower overlooking Tokyo's Minato City, enveloped in 2,200 square meters of private gardens—was awarded first place in the International category and second place in the Independent Living category.

Congrats to the team and our fellow awardees!

Learn more here: https://shnawards.com/nominees/park-wellstate-nishiazabu-international/

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