As Innovative companies seek to transform their cultures and workplaces, the traditional office campus is in a state of accelerated evolution. The Pacific Center Campus Development demonstrates how landscape architecture can lead and enrich this evolution by melding active campus design ideas and innovative workplace strategies with native plant ecosystems, innovative water strategies, and the productivity and health benefits of being surrounded by nature. A transformative redevelopment and expansion of an existing 20-acre campus for a major Fortune 500 technology company, the PCCD design transforms the existing site from an office park dominated by surface parking and water-dependent fescue lawns to an immersive, pedestrian-oriented campus environment that integrates beautiful indoor and outdoor spaces into native landscapes.

The landscapes of the Research and Development Building showcase the integration of landscape and architecture in many ways. Located in a corner of the campus adjacent to busy arterial streets, the building is depressed into the landscape, to create vertical separation and a vegetated buffer from the noisy adjacent roadway and to provide the opportunity for the cascading gabion walls, terraces, and wetlands that collect excess runoff. The integration of all built forms extends to the selection of materials: the design team was deliberate in a unified palette of materials, finishes, and details to blur the lines between indoors and outdoors. Throughout design and construction, the team was extremely diligent in ensuring that the unification of all project spaces into a cohesive series of spaces was fully realized.

The project lies one block south of the Lopez Canyon, one of the many beautiful natural canyon landscapes that extends throughout northern San Diego. The extensive hiking trail system weaving through Lopez Canyon is used by many employees throughout the neighborhood, and it provided the inspiration behind one of the project’s  signature features: the trail that extends from the Lopez Canyon and loops throughout the project, bringing with it the native landscapes of the canyon that fill up the edges and center of campus. This idea of connecting to the trail and weaving the canyon landscape around the site became an overriding inspiration as the project moved from planning into detailed design and construction.

The landscape typologies found throughout the project are an interpretation of the local canyon and coastal sage landscapes, but also a finely tuned response to the unique ecotones created by building placement, programmatic needs, and the idiosyncrasies and chance opportunities of a campus evolving over time. The coastal sage and desert landscapes that follow the trail from the Lopez Canyon give way gently to meadows and gardens in the center of campus, forest understory zones in the shade of the buildings, and wetlands in the low zones surrounding the south and east edges of the Research and Development building.

Located in a city and region that is acutely aware of the need for water stewardship, the project showcases a number of highly visible sustainable water strategies in ways that highlight their relationships to native ecosystems. The design team overcame many technical challenges related to existing infrastructure and poor soils to create a system of integrated storm water features, which are implemented to beautiful effect throughout the campus.

The stormwater zones are designed based on a simple premise; even though these zones must handle the seasonal rains, water will not often be present given the arid climate. The landscapes are designed to speak to the memory of water, through topography, through planting palette, and visual cues. This ephemeral nature of water is expressed throughout the project in a variety of ways. On the perimeter of the project constructed wetlands capture the majority of runoff from the new building and create dense, rocky buffer zones inhabitable by way of bridges and extended concrete terraces. Conversely, the hardscape plazas, enclosed by the new building, feature wetlands that juxtapose the flowing sedges and grasses with hard concrete edges, creating sharp contrasts between the natural and built features, and creating the experience of crossing them on bridges.