MVVA has some fantastic landscapes in their body of work. We love how in most cases they create an environment that is much bigger in scale than the human form. This allows one to feel part of or incorporated into the landscape. The design brings sunshine and snowstorms into the daily life of the workplace using a mere 2,000 square feet of green cut into 225,000 square feet of windowless suburban architecture. The massive blocks of concrete, the large stacked slabs of stone or even the natural slices of wood would be so killer to interact with.
The tactile and sensual qualities of the materials and their placement reinforce microclimatic differences in the courtyards, creating a terrace in the western courtyard where it is sunny in winter and a second terrace on the opposite side of the other courtyard where it is shaded in summer. In each courtyard, a “river” of locally-harvested logs, cut flat to work as walking surfaces, widens out to create sitting terraces and adds an innovative abstraction of a forest floor to the design. MVVA worked with the interior design team to position the two courtyards so that one can always glimpse the delicate composition of river birch, hellebore, moss, river cobbles, and black locust planks that make up the courtyard design.
