Introduction

This corporate headquarters campus design distills the essence of the North Texas prairie through careful placement of built elements and a thorough knowledge of site terrain, drainage systems, plant communities, and design expression derived from the native landscape. The project, located on a 309-acre site adjacent to Solana (between Dallas and Fort Worth), includes a 650,000-square-foot office and a parking structure for 2,700 cars. The active ranchland is part open pasture and part Post Oak Savannah, and has wildflower meadows, rolling terrain, and two existing ponds.

The client directed the landscape architects to integrate the project into the site, capitalizing on all of its amenities and restoring the site to its native state. The landscape architects provided full services for the project, including site planning, architectural massing and configuration, planting, and design of watercourses.

Concept

Site planning involved a series of collaborative design charettes between client representatives and the design team to set floor plate sizes, relationships to exterior spaces, and overall massing. The landscape architects recorded the spatial character of the site, and prepared analysis drawings documenting their findings and identifying opportunities and constraints.

From these studies, the design team determined that the campus should emulate the experience of a "country home," with buildings, roadways, and garage integrated into the indigenous landscape. Instead of leaving home to work in the city, employees would leave the city to work in a place where they could experience beauty and nature. Every design element preserves as many existing trees, plant communities, and habitat areas as possible, and the interventions include dam reconstruction, pond reshaping, dredging, and restoration of edge habitat. Surveys of each tree over 6" caliper were utilized to design road networks and building pads, and an initial decision was made to accommodate cars within a five-story parking

structure in order to save trees and preserve land for the creation of a meadow. Drainage from the garage supplies a created wetland that includes phyto-remediating plants.

Existing topography was carefully considered in the articulation of spatial sequences in the main lobby and dining areas, as well as in the design of the parking structure-notched into an existing hillside to screen it from the surrounding road networks. The use of Texas sandstone, steel, and glass on both the building and site work established a palette that harmonizes with the subtle coloration, texture, and seasonal extremes of the site. Meadow grasses and indigenous plant material-and minimal use of irrigated turf areas-maintain the qualities of the Texas grasslands. Exterior public spaces such as the main entry are articulated with flagstone, spring-like water features, and drifts of dry-land plant materials like prickly pear cactus and Muhly Grass. Roadways are narrow and curb-less to express the idea of a country road, and to allow water to re-enter the landscape. Roadway lighting is placed in trees rather than on poles, and all site hardware is minimized. Overall, site geometry is purposely non-directional in order to stitch the new design into the natural landscape.

Impact

The Westlake campus was the first land development along the rapidly-developing Highway 114 Corridor in the Town of Westlake, where many ranches are under pressure from suburbanization. The project met and exceeded all development standards mandated by the town, and has become its model for future development. The team's approach to understanding, maintaining, and fostering ecological systems-including the establishment of approximately 1,000 new trees for the next generation of forest and attention to the issues of water conservation and maximum percolation-demonstrates that the unique qualities of a region can be preserved through careful attention and a holistic approach to design.