Small is Beautiful, Millburn, New Jersey
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts/New York, New York

These designs reaffirm that landscape architects can apply good design to a small commission to viscerally transform the work environment of hundreds of people.  These tiny courtyards bring sunshine and snowstorms into the daily life of this workplace, using a mere 2,000 square feet of green cut into 225,000 square feet of suburban work space.  

We feel that the Tahari project warrants ASLA  recognition for the following reasons:  we showed how good design that is not overly object oriented can create a feeling of boundlessness; we created a great design on a small budget; and we chose to work with the tactile and sensual qualities of materials and their placements to reinforce microclimatic differences in the courtyards—creating a terrace in the western courtyard where it is sunny in winter, and a second terrace on the opposite side of the other courtyard where it is shaded in summer.  A “river” of logs, cut flat to work as walking surfaces, connect the two courtyards in both gesture and materiality.  The pattern of logs, harvested locally, widens out to create sitting terraces and add an innovative abstraction of a forest floor to the design.

The courtyards were created by cutting away the roof and structure to allow the sky and the weather to penetrate deep within the building.  The landscape architects worked with the architects to place the two courtyards such that they are almost the first thing you experience once you arrive inside the work environment.    

The fashion designer Eli Tahari hired us to add the soothing and life-improving qualities of a landscape to a one-story, windowless suburban "box" he was renovating to relocate 300 warehouse and accounting staff.  Mr. Tahari's work spaces in New York City are renowned for unusual uses of landscape and sensuous materials to make good places to work.  He hired us to add that feeling to an otherwise hostile suburban building type.  The glass-enclosed courtyards created an expansive and boundless experience to either pass by, look at, or occupy as part of the everyday life of the workplace. 

This project shows how giving up just one percent of the floor area transforms the feeling of the work environment, and since tens of millions of Americans spend their days in similar settings, we feel it provides an important example.  Moreover, the budget was not large.