Arrival Renovation
Cone Health Wesley Long Hospital
Greensboro, North Carolina
This arrival sequence renovation for a busy regional hospital enhances pedestrian and vehicular accessibility, comfort and experience. New shaded arrival and seating areas, generous benches, pedestrian scale lighting, and lush plantings combine to create a welcoming and unified look. Special attention to pavement types, texture and color cues provide additional safety, way-finding and orientation features separating vehicle and pedestrian traffic in this busy entry. Decking over graded areas provides level areas for wheelchair use.
[w/Reaves|Dinep, Brasfield & Gorrie]
Size: 0.7 acres
Budget: $900,000, renovation
Concept Design
Memorial + Wellness Garden
Uconn Health
Farmington, Connecticut
At the interface of a stormwater pond and wooded wetlands this highly visible entry location will showcase a welcoming, sustainable, and inspiring approach to the Uconn Health campus landscape. With the incredible transformation of Uconn Health's building facilities over recent years, this project has the potential to bring a level of attention to the landscape - equally worthy of the architectural quality that has been achieved. Combining the programmatic concepts of memorialization, human wellness, and environmental health, this landscape space aligns with the healing mission of the institution, offers opportunities for fundraising, and maximizes the site’s many assets.
Proposed Memorial Pond Walk
Proposed Alumni Walk + Lawn
Proposed Woodland Boardwalk
The Healing Garden
Cone Health Cancer Center
Greensboro, North Carolina
This new destination on the hospital campus adds a unique dimension to the healing power of this Cancer Treatment Center. The Cancer Center, located along the Buffalo Creek, is adjacent to a federally regulated wetland that functions as biofiltration for seven acres of stormwater runoff from surrounding paved areas. This dynamic hydrologic system was re-visioned as a garden space for patients, families and staff. New accessible boardwalks, a bridge, a restored stream channel, restored wetland, a retrofitted biocell, and a native grassland meadow now populate this once barren wilderness.
[w/Studio Pagliai, MWM Construction]
Size: 1.1 acres
Budget: $1M
Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial
Concept Design
Sandy Hook, Connecticut
Where do we go to connect with our memories? A place that is peaceful, alive + transcendent...
As a destination for remembrance and connection, a cenotaph, a gently curving memorial wall within an intimate gathering terrace is the focal point. The serpentine shape engages space, its stones express movement and its six-foot height relates to the human body. In acknowledgment of our instinct to do so, inscription stones provide a small relief upon which to leave a token of remembrance. Curving pathways echo the form of the memorial wall and offer contemplative, welcoming, and elevating experiences surrounded by nature. Seating is integrated into the walkways corresponding to the need for rest or the desire for communion with someone - or a thing of beauty - along the way. Local naturalist William Gibson was inspiration for the haiku.
[w/Ted Efremoff, Matthew Cosma, Lidija Ristovska]
Size: 5 acres
The Lusk Center
Hospice & Palliative Care of Greensboro
Greensboro, North Carolina
This award-winning Hospice and Palliative Care of Greensboro administrative campus was designed to align with the organization's mission of access, comfort and care. The central landscape element is a richly planted and flexible terrace space visible and accessible from training and conference rooms and sited within the context of a meadow. Additional intimately scaled terraces and walkways with native, low maintenance planting of intense seasonal interest provide contemplative areas for daily use. Spaces are designed to combine for tenting during fundraising and memorial functions.
The dramatic backdrop of the adjacent historic industrial mill and native meadow on this brownfield site, served as inspiration for the planting palette.
[w/TFF Architects, Reaves|Dinep]
Size: 7.0 acres
Budget: $300,000, new construction
Sustainability Research
Title: Sustainable Site Design
Criteria, Process + Case Studies for Integrating Site and Region in Landscape Design
Authors: Claudia Dinep and Kristin Schwab
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, 2010
This book details six successful sustainable landscape projects and emphasizes each project's unique potential for sustainability, in relation to the ecological, social,economic, and cultural conditions of its regional setting. It outlines in detail each project's features that successfully integrate landscape function with memorable, meaningful form.
Land Art Generator Initiative
Invited Competition
Willimantic Whitewater Park
Conceptual Environmental Art Design
Willimantic Connecticut
“Water, the Hub of Life. Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium. Water is the most extraordinary substance! Practically all its properties are anomolous, which enabled life to use it as building material for its machinery.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
As a team of artists, landscape architects and energy experts - all with a deep local sensibility and critical expertise - we tap into a variety of existing community sectors - artists, craftspeople, technical and construction experts, families, public servants, and interested citizens-- to gauge their attitudes toward the site, their sustainability values, and their reactions to the concepts considered. The voice of the Willimantic community participants had a strong presence in this design proposal.
The proposed Solar Boombox artwork celebrates the vitality, multiculturalism and fun the park embodies as a hub of community energy. Numerous options exist for how interactive this audio content might be for the public.
Phase 2 of the design concept is envisioned as a build-out for the Whitewater Park. The plan incorporates elements that integrate and support the conceptual themes of waves, sound, movement, energy and community.
[w/Ted Efremoff, Matthew Macunas, Richard Dziadul, Lidija Ristovska, Katarina Ristic + citizens of Willimantic CT too numerous to list here]
School of Nursing, Entry Terrace Renovation
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA
This gradually terraced space over structure was envisioned as a new identity for the building entry with elegant and complimentary signage + lush planting, creating an alive and human scaled landscape within a predominantly urbanized university hospital campus.
[Claudia Dinep was project manager of this project while principal w/Rolf Sauer & Partners. Dinep+Schwab is not associated with Rolf Sauer & Partners]
Sandstone Visitor Center
Site Planning + Design
Sandstone WV
This National Park Service Visitor Center, a LEED project, located along the New River is designed to interpret and demonstrate watershed action, stormwater management used for irrigation and biofiltration and meadow and copse forest establishment.
[Claudia Dinep was project designer of this project
while principal w/Rolf Sauer & Partners. Dinep+Schwab is not associated with Rolf Sauer & Partners]
Immaculate Heart of Mary
Master Plan + Site Design
Monroe MI
This 200 acre convent campus, a LEED certified project, was transformed from a highly tended landscape to a biodiverse one: restored the oak hickory forest, biodiverse meadows, bioswales, greywater wetland and geothermal wells.
[Claudia Dinep was project designer of this project
while principal w/Rolf Sauer & Partners. Dinep+Schwab is not associated with Rolf Sauer & Partners]
