At the intersection of 13th Street and 2nd Avenue, a half-block of residual urban fabric, once occupied by an auto dealership, repair shop, bank and surface parking, has been recalibrated into a dense network of indoor/outdoor retail and dining spaces. Rather than centering the project solely on buildings, the design pivots outward, privileging the interstitial: terraces, corridors and thresholds. These exterior spaces now serve as the connective tissue of Highside Market, shaping how people move, gather and linger. The result is less a collection of structures and more a cohesive terrain, an urban landscape defined by its openness, permeability and elasticity.

Inventive Reuses
Highside Market embraces the inherited narratives embedded within its site, treating existing structures not as constraints but as catalysts. Buildings 211 and 201 retain their historic shells while accommodating new programs, allowing traces of their former lives to remain legible. Elsewhere, subtraction becomes as meaningful as preservation: Building 213 is partially deconstructed and reborn as a shade pavilion, its skeletal frame extending the life of the original structure in an open-air form. Industrial artifacts, such as steel trench grates, are reinterpreted and reused throughout the site as both benches and barriers, their new identities carrying forward the tactile memory of the site. Through this intentional salvaging, the project constructs a dialogue between past and present, where reuse becomes a sustainable strategy as well as a narrative device.

 

Strategic Resourcefulness
The material palette reflects a deliberate embrace of economy and ingenuity. Concrete, gravel and masonry block, materials often relegated to gritty, utilitarian roles, are elevated with careful detailing and craft to create spaces that feel considered and intimate. The design extracts richness from technique: scoring, raking and patterning render large slabs to the scale of the human body, transforming what would otherwise feel like vast expanses of paving into textured, amiable fields of occupation. Oversized industrial safety striping is applied as a unifying graphic strategy, producing complex and engaging ground conditions through humble shifts in surface treatment. These material tactics were explored in collaboration with the contractor throughout the construction process, where iterative mockups and on-site adjustments allowed the design to evolve in real time. Each material is intended to add a new layer of texture and patina to the rich tapestry of the site while carefully creating a space that is unifying, flexible, accessible and welcoming, where modest interventions yield rich spatial effects.

Inscribed Order
While the material palette retains an industrial robustness, its articulation is carefully tuned to the scale of the body through finer-grained interventions. Expansion and control joints, typically treated as purely functional, are renegotiated as a design tool, establishing a subtle but present order across the site. Instead of the standard catatonic grid, the joint strategy adapts to the site's natural paths of desire, embedding circulation directly into the hardscape surface. These scored pathways expand and contract, aligning with entry points, sidewalks and surrounding streets to create seamless connections in and out, across and through the development, their boundaries defined by subtle changes in texture and alignment rather than curbs. In this way, the entire site reads as a continuous plane of movement, calibrated to both pedestrian and vehicular flow.

Nooks and Crannies
Highside's patterned hardscape defines a series of outdoor rooms within the continuous ground plane. Subtle shifts in joint orientation, density and alignment delineate spaces for gathering and dining without relying on walls or fences. These rooms, benefiting from both enclosure and visibility, are articulated by fixed benches, movable chairs and communal tables clustered along desire lines and at points of convergence. Edges play a critical role in this spatial hierarchy. Building fronts, planting zones and shade structures act as soft boundaries, while the paving patterns reinforce their presence. The result is a gradient of spaces, from active corridors to quieter pockets, each defined primarily through the manipulation of the ground.

Phenological Assemblages
Highside's diverse collection of plants is choreographed to celebrate the dynamic fluctuation of textures and spatial qualities of the seasons, and the strong silhouettes of grasses and perennials create engaging spaces throughout the development. The site's rich planting operates in tandem with the hardscape, occupying fragments carved out of the industrial-scale concrete surface, with their placement falling within the rhythmic armature established by the sitewide hardscape jointing strategy. The robust plants of Highside are designed to spill onto the concrete paving, blurring the crisp joints to offer a sense of immersion, welcome and wonder, creating a space that feels alive and responsive.

As seen in LASN magazine, July 2026.