Re-Wilding the City: Urban Landscapes as Integral Urban Infrastructure

10,000 SUNS and Living Edge, are recent urban landscape projects by the Landscape Architecture office Design Under Sky, led by Landscape Architect Adam E. Anderson. Each project presents a unique strategy in their initiation, constructability, site challenges and their response to urban and natural forces in the city. In this site tour, we will explore these projects and highlight interesting moments in the process and development, as well as new discoveries since their conception. The tour will start at the Living Edge, then follow to 10,000 SUNS.

Adam Anderson

Adam E. Anderson is a licensed landscape architect and artist whose projects vary in a range of scales that include but are not excluded to hospital healing gardens, residential landscapes, masterplanning, campus plazas, rooftop gardens, and urban parks, as well as commissioned public art works. He is quickly becoming one of the leading design figures in Healthcare Landscapes, with large scale projects for major institutions underway throughout the US and internationally. His work and his studio, Design Under Sky, negotiates with the ever changing landscape by understanding the unique phenomenological qualities and cultural influences inherent in a site, and then deploying interventions to embrace, reveal, and often embellish these qualities. “Nature” is abstracted in his projects, culminating in a celebration of wonder found in both the technological and ecological.

A few of his current projects in progress include 10,000 SUNS: Highway to Park Project, in which ten thousand sunflower seeds are being cultivated to transform vacant former highway land, Roger Williams Park Gateway and Visitors Center, a new public park space welcoming the Broad St. Community, and the Living Edge, a riverfront urban pocket park that “rewilds” the water’s edge in downtown Providence. Prior to forming the D.U.S. studio Adam worked for the international award winning offices of Landworks Studio and Ground, Inc. in Boston. He is also currently an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Landscape Architecture Department at the Rhode Island School of Design, and leads the Landscape Architecture Department at Payette Associates, a 160-person multi-disciplinary design office in Boston, MA.