When the landscape architecture profession is handing out awards, Charlottesville firm Nelson Byrd Woltz often goes home with a new accolade. (Its design for the Dell at UVA, for example, earned the 25-year-old company a national award just last year.) More importantly, NBW is designing spaces that will have national significance—places that, over time, millions of people will experience.
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Another St. Louis design strategy for Thomas Woltz (left), Warren Byrd and their team: drawing from a 1916 map of the two-block area that’s now Citygarden. “There used to be old buildings and foundations there, and alleyways that had been completely erased….We used the alignment of the alleyways as our central pathways.” |
Take, for one, the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, memorial to the victims of Flight 93. The site is now owned by the National Park Service, and a 2005 competition for memorial designs yielded 1,100 entries. NBW’s concept won, detailing a circular bowl that’s surrounded by groves of red maples and overlooks the area where the plane came down. NBW founding principal Warren Byrd says that collaboration with knowledgeable locals—from civil engineers to Penn State forestry experts—was key to the design’s success.
That’s true any time the firm is working on someone else’s turf, Byrd says: “You have to go into it with some kind of humility.” In St. Louis last summer, Citygarden—a two-block sculpture garden near the iconic Arch—opened to the public, featuring the design NBW developed in collaboration with local stonemasons, fountain makers, architects and horticulturists.
“We drew heavily on local and regional design clues, local ecologies and geologies,” Byrd says. “One of the biggest design gestures we made was a 550-foot-long high limestone arc wall,” which defines a major pathway through the site and echoes the limestone bluffs found nearby on the Mississippi River. Another, lower wall meanders through deep curves that recall the river’s snaking course.
“We do want the design work we do to be about their place,” Byrd says, “about St. Louis.” Or, in the case of another current project, about Albemarle County: NBW is involved with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s plans for a new education center on Montalto. Though you certainly could travel far to see NBW’s work, the firm has left its mark right here at home.
