Brown University Danoff Laboratories
Providence, RI

Set within Providence’s Jewelry District, our landscape for Brown’s new Danoff Labs reclaims a monolithic urban block by restoring its porosity and reintroducing the texture of wildness into the city. Three distinct landscape spaces—North Link, South Link, and the Upper Patio—gather around the building to form a series of public and semi-public gardens.

The North Link is a hard-edged civic plaza, stitched into the urban fabric and adjacent to Ship Street Square, acting as a mixing zone between the pedestrian bridge from the East Side and the entry to Brown’s growing Jewelry District campus. The South Link, bathed in sun, becomes the site’s most immersive garden—planted richly, and designed to hold and celebrate stormwater as it descends toward the street. Above, the Upper Patio offers a quiet promontory where building users can gather, host events, or look out over the district below.

Referencing the site’s layered history, both as riverbank and filled industrial land, our design imagines the removal of the industrial cap, allowing spontaneous, ruderal vegetation to reclaim the surface. Materials recall the adjacent shoreline edge: seawalls, aggregates, and concrete come together in a tough, durable palette that reflects the area’s maritime and infrastructural character. Plantings are wild and textural, embracing a kind of urban grit that stands in contrast to Brown’s more formal campus landscapes.

Our circulation threads throughout the site, reconnecting severed pathways and offering new pedestrian passages across the block. In doing so, the landscape becomes both connective tissue and expressive ground—recasting the district as a place of ecological reemergence and everyday life in Providence.

Collaborators
TenBerke
Ballinger
VHB