Towering thirty-two stories above downtown, Architect Helmut Jahn's First American Bank Plaza punctuates the San Diego skyline. At its feet sit the new San Diego Trolley Station, the historic Santa Fe Train Station, and a small, urban Plaza that provides a modest forecourt to the Bank Building. Enclosed on all four sides by a ten-foot-high construction wall at street level, the remainder of the 200' x 300' site houses a below-grade parking structure. Originally envisioned as a multi-story downtown luxury hotel built above the existing parking garage to service the San Diego Convention Center, building plans halted in the late 1980's. The vacant site remained a barren city block, sporting exposed rebar columns, trash enclosures and unsightly utilities and electrical conduit for three years. And so with no construction scheduled for the near future, Shimizu Development joined together with The Collaborative West to provide an interim solution-- an innovative, functional and inexpensive landscape-- for the garden that beautifies the city's core.

Under the guidance of Principal Paul Haden, Landscape Architects set out to honor and unite the disparate elements of the downtown block while creating a functional and visually exciting public square that responded to the urban context of the surrounding skyscrapers and the existing Plaza. By extending the strong paving solution established in the existing bank forecourt, the resulting design of crushed gravel, 36" box trees and brightly painted surfaces heightens the perception of the site's unique downtown location and high visibility. A colorful, blue and yellow grid over the parking structure reflects the architect's window detailing. A palette of palms, podocarpus, ligustrum and ficus, was brought in at 24" box size. On site, the trees were transferred to 36" boxes to allow room for growth over the next few years-- in a sense, the site functions as a temporary nursery. When the site is finally built out, the trees will be used on-site.

Operating under very stringent constraints-- a budget of approximately $35,000 and the basic understanding that the Plaza was a temporary space, intended for public view but not public access--the Landscape Architects met the challenge by combining their diverse backgrounds of the individual team members with the collaborative atmosphere of their office to channel the difficulties into attributes of the project. Under the direction of Project Manager Robert Foster and Project Designer Annemarie Hall, the entire design team incorporated an acknowledgment of the site's constraints and an understanding of its future intended use to transform a vacant concrete lot into a bold, colorful urban plaza.