Archinect - News

SWA Group helps plant 300 blooming trees in tribute to late Congressman John Lewis in Atlanta

2021-02-23T12:31:00-05:00

Through its master planning effort for Atlanta’s Freedom Park, SWA Group is participating in "Flowering Forest – A Tree Tribute to Civil Rights Leader John Lewis," a collaborative, living memorial to the late Congressman and Civil Rights leader, to be located in the park. John Lewis was instrumental in establishing Freedom Park, which is located at the heart of where the national Civil Rights movement was born.

The living memorial to Lewis is the culmination of a three-day volunteer planting project that took in mid-February in which 300 blooming trees were planted at his namesake plaza in Atlanta. The Freedom Park Conservancy, Trees Atlanta, and The National Center for Civil and Human Rights all participated in the event.

Freedom Park Master Plan. 1. John Lewis Plaza; 2. Lake Lewis; 3. “Flowering Forest” Tree Tribute; 4. John Lewis Freedom Parkway Garden. Courtesy SWA Group.

SWA assisted with the overall vision of the tribute. Landscape architects at SWA also assisted with the selec...

"An Angry Passion": Round-Up of Global Tributes to Charles Correa

2015-06-18T13:31:00-04:00

Although memorial tributes are rarely upbeat, an unusual tenor of melancholy pervades the world's reaction to Charles Correa's death late Tuesday at age 84. The architect named "India's Greatest" by RIBA in 2013 has, in his passing, seemingly become an emblem of an entire subcontinent's struggles as much as the "open-to-sky" spaces which he leaves behind. In a tribute titled "Charles Correa wanted to design a better Mumbai – but the city let him down" in The Guardian, Bachi Karkaria portrays Correa as a visionary who was forever denied the recognition he deserved by Mumbai. "Correa’s real passion was the designing of cities that are easy to live, work, play – and commute – in. But his karma was Mumbai, which can check none of these boxes with a straight face," Karkaria writes. "The man who described cities as “places of hope” was fated to live in a city of disappointments. It’s not just because its skyline resembles an alarming ECG. More specifically, Mumbai mindlessly sabotaged two...