The beauty of Park(ing) Day, an international event dedicated to improving the quality of the urban environment, lies in the impact of transforming a parking space into a park. This year, our team at Landscape Architecture Bureau [LAB] saw Park(ing) Day as an opportunity to actively engage the neighborhood where we work. Turf’s Up! Park was conceived as an open-access dining space on 8th SE in Washington DC’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The park provided a communal space that blurred the line between landscape and furniture, emphasizing the highly constructed nature of urban landscapes, and celebrating the activity of shared dining within a fully public space.
LAB’s studio is just around the corner from Barracks Row, a busy streetscape that has recently developed into a vibrant urban commercial district. As landscape architects, we’ve noticed how that added intensity has strained the public space. Sidewalks are tight and crowded with outdoor seating, tree pits are trampled and lack vegetation, leaving little space for anything else. By deploying creative placemaking principles, our temporary park addressed a few of these limitations. Led by two of our junior designers, LAB’s collaborative design process was fast-paced and inventive.
The design centered around a vegetated table that invited community members and passers-by to step inside and have a seat. This gesture repeated along the park’s back edge creating additional seating space and prompting park-goers to interact with the lifted ground. Repurposed milk crates donated from neighborhood restaurant Rose’s Luxury were topped with colorful artificial turf and used as moveable seating throughout the park, encouraging visitors to rearrange them and make Turf’s Up! Park their own.
Participating in Park(ing) Day gave LAB the opportunity to demonstrate our values about engaging, accessible public space and address the need for more of it within our local community. The best part of this process was that it gave us the chance to sit down with our neighbors and talk about landscape architecture in a space that represented its potential. These exchanges will continue to inform and refresh our current practice and future work.
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LAB’s TURF’S UP! PARK was only possible with support from neighborhood restaurant Rose’s Luxury, plant donations from local garden center Ginkgo Gardens, and sedum blankets from Sempergreen’s regional nursery. Additional thanks to local yoga studio Be Here Now Yoga for snacks and water and to SYNLawn for artificial turf samples.
Learn more about Park(ing) Day on their official website, and make plans to participate next year!