Georgia ASLA Honors Atlanta Studio with Firm of the Year, Design Excellence

Perkins&Will Atlanta founded its landscape architecture studio in 2007 as a bold step toward leading the industry in sustainability, integrated design, and resilient environments. In the decade and a half since its founding, the studio has changed the way landscape architects and building architects work together at the largest firm in Georgia and broadly throughout the industry.

The recipient of nearly 100 design awards since its inception—among them ASLA National Awards and first place for Conceptual Design at the International Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism—the group has brought respect and awareness to Georgia for its contributions to landscape architecture and urban design.   

Wilkins Plaza at the center of George Mason’s Fairfax, Virginia, campus creates a 1000-foot-long student life corridor that celebrates themes of well-being, diversity, racial justice, and inclusion. The project acknowledges the importance of both engaged social well-being and more solitary pursuits. The plaza plays host to student life functions, such as student group displays and campus cultural events, as well as opportunities for quiet reflection. With these elements, the east end of the plaza, closest to student housing, is meant to engender a “hang out culture” for this university that was formerly more focused on a population of commuting students. Additionally, the western end of the plaza incorporates a new Memorial to the Enslaved People of George Mason, serving as a model for bottom-up efforts for lines of inquiry into equity and racial justice to become a celebration of diversity and inclusion in designed physical space.  

Our design for the Atlanta Financial Center, in the commercial corridor of north Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, reinvents the office-tower courtyard as a serene, engaging park for wireless work, lunch breaks, team meetings, or events. Nested between a highway, a commercial thoroughfare, and a 1980s office building, this new “working landscape” is a dynamic space where health and resilience come together as workplace and environmental priorities. 

The centerpiece is a sculptural precast-concrete seating wall that twists around an elliptical lawn.  A continuous path of crushed slate spirals out along the wall, providing stormwater infiltration and opening into a large plaza, where picnic and cafe tables allow the space to flex for formal and informal business gatherings. This elegant park reflects the character of the surrounding neighborhood and provides a calm retreat for workers in the adjacent office towers.