Schuylkill Yards wins Pennsylvania-Delaware ASLA Chapter Honor Award

West 8 and SHoP Architects’ Schuylkill Yards has received an Honor Award in the Analysis and Planning Category of the 2017 Pennsylvania-Delaware ASLA Chapter Awards. Schuylkill Yards is a novel university-corporate partnership that has been established to develop 14-acres of prime real estate into Philadelphia’s next great urban neighborhood. Capitalizing on the site’s adjacency to academic institutions and the nation’s third busiest rail station, Schuylkill Yards will be the hub for innovation on the northeast corridor.

West 8 and SHoP Architects take copious but compartmentalized resources and merge them into one dynamic, flexible network to produce a Schuylkill Yards Master Plan that sets a new standard for analysis, planning, and development. The jury offered complements of the “comparison to city context and important open space network. Good understanding of urban scale. Graphics are to the point and easy to understand without being overdone.”

To realize the potential of Schuylkill Yards to become an innovation hub and allow it to evolve freely, the design team created an intrinsically flexible planning document. The plan should function as a framework by defining performance-based design guidelines rather than prescriptive ones, allowing true diversity of program and aesthetic per parcel and placing sustainability at the forefront of this effort. In addition to the inherently “sustainable” character of the project as a high-density, mixed-use development near transit, the Master Plan includes numerous environmental guidelines and strategies including stormwater management to minimize runoff into the city’s stormwater system, a district-wide pneumatic tube waste management system, on-site energy generation and sharing, goals for reducing energy consumption, and strategies for maximizing daylight penetration for interior spaces. We are honored that the Pennsylvania-Delaware ASLA Chapter recognized these strategies with an award. The award will be presented at the Chapter conference in Wilmington, Delaware, April 21-22. Visit the Chapter website for more information: http://www.padeasla.org/.