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  Eastwick Alleywalk proposes to rehabilitate a vacant parcel in Southwest Philadelphia as a major point of intersection in a new, enhanced network of bicycle-friendly streets.

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  The Alleywalk’s design connects to existing parks and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission’s Greenways, planned for 2030.

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  The final design of the Eastwick park includes groves, fields, and promenades cutting across the neighborhood grid to create new spaces and connections between streets.

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  The project’s four main systems, designed as one process, are tree groves, nursery production, turf fields and meadows, and paths of circulation.

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  A variety of native and non-native trees line paths and populate groves throughout the park.

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  This detailed plan view illustrates interactions between the park’s four systems, and how these interactions define interesting and beautiful spaces within the park.

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  Dramatic changes in elevation create spaces vertically as well as horizontally.

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  Transitions between groves and meadows are marked by paths, and by changes in shade, sun, and views.

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  While hills and channels cover most of the park, nurseries are established on level ground.

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  Spacing between trees and planting beds is important when planning the nurseries, as is knowing when to transplant seedlings out of pots and directly into soil.

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  Dense bamboo groves offer welcome shade after a long expanse of unshaded meadow.

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  Moving from evergreen grove to maple groves full of reddening leaves is an intense visual experience.

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  Planted groves and nurseries both divide and frame a landscape full of changing spaces and perspectives.

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Tags: bamboo, bicycle, circulation, corridors, cycle, DVRPC, Eastwick, elevation, greenbelt, Greenways, groves, grow, hills, lotsoflots, meadow, network, nursery, Philadelphia, play, production, promenade, slope, student, terrace, terrain, transplant, transportation, turf, UrbanArboretum

Creating corridors and connecting parks and the city.

Eastwick Alleywalk is a project by Brian Sabri, a student in Pennsylvania State University’s undergraduate landscape architecture program.  Sabri participated in a studio entitled The Urban Arboretum: From Vacancy to Hybrid Landscape, a design course inspired by Matthew Langan’s eponymous proposal for the Urban Voids competition.  The Spring 2010 studio was taught by Tim Baird with assistance from Langan, a graduate of the program.

Eastwick Alleywalk proposes to rehabilitate a vacant parcel in Southwest Philadelphia as a major point of intersection in a new, enhanced network of bicycle-friendly streets, using the existing park system and the Greenways network (planned for 2030) as a starting point.  The Eastwick park is a production site for the trees that will eventually line these Greenways and streets.  Visual and sensory impact are important to the design of the park, especially the single-species groves of trees cutting through larger open areas of meadow, wetland, and nursery.  Groves not only envelope visitors in sheltered promenades, but also act as barriers and frames to views of the landscape from a number of different vantage points.  Combining intimate and sweeping scales is one of this proposal’s strengths as a park.

SOURCE:

Urban Arboretum: From Vacancy to Hybrid Landscape. Landscape Architecture 414. The Pennsylvania State University College of Arts and Architecture, Spring 2010.

The Designers

• Pennsylvania State University Bachelor of Landscape Architecture Program   University Park, PA