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John J. Bowen Center for Science and Innovation
Creating a People-Centered, Ecologically Sensitive Campus Landscape
Providence, RIOverview
Traverse provided the landscape design for a new 71,000-square-foot building for Johnson and Wales University. The facility serves the School of Engineering and Design as well as JWU’s new biology program.
The landscape is designed as a series of outdoor rooms shaped to encourage collaboration and cross-disciplinary dialog. The design features seat walls arranged to create intimate meeting spaces and a custom-designed communal table configured to engage the campus community and the street. It also features a native plant palette and a rain garden with infiltrating tree pits to capture stormwater on site. These elements combine to create a landscape that is both materially impactful and formally legible.
The plan organization of both the building and landscape work to reinforce the university’s campus master plan, and as the first building to be built on land recently vacated by the relocated interstate 195, it will be helping to create the context that future development there may follow.
The landscape is designed as a series of outdoor rooms shaped to encourage collaboration and cross-disciplinary dialog. The design features seat walls arranged to create intimate meeting spaces and a custom-designed communal table configured to engage the campus community and the street. It also features a native plant palette and a rain garden with infiltrating tree pits to capture stormwater on site. These elements combine to create a landscape that is both materially impactful and formally legible.
The plan organization of both the building and landscape work to reinforce the university’s campus master plan, and as the first building to be built on land recently vacated by the relocated interstate 195, it will be helping to create the context that future development there may follow.
