With the Neighborhood in Mind

INTERSTICE designed the landscape of the Palo Alto Public Safety Building to privilege the public pedestrian realm and.  While each of the four frontages are treated uniquely, they are designed to create a unified streetscape that enhances the pedestrian experience for the California Avenue neighbors and residents.  The civic perimeter of the Public Safety Building creates a welcoming place with broad walking areas and various integrated seating amenities for the surrounding community that pass by each day on their way to and from their homes, workplaces and the California Avenue commercial district.  The new landscape of the Public Safety Building is meant to reinforce the public safety officers’ role in the lively Cal Avenue neighborhood as good neighbors and important guardians of the community, while discretely providing a protective perimeter that is hardened to vehicular traffic.

Street by Street

INTERSTICE has ensured that each streetscape on the project is unique to its function and presentation of the Public Safety Building to this neighborhood of Palo Alto.

The Birch Street frontage is a generous tree-framed sidewalk completed by the streetscape at the parking Garage across Birch, also designed by INTERSTICE.  The broad stair and welcoming ramp lead from the intersection of Birch and Sherman Avenue to the Public Safety building entry.  Seating opportunities are integrated into the plantings that face this wide sidewalk at the Birch Plaza and turn the corner along Sherman Avenue. 

Place & Space For Art

Plantings, seating and artworks are combined to create a softened plaza that sits over the underground parking and public safety functions below grade.  The sittable plinth provides a place to pause, take a break or eat lunch in the foreground of an interior meant for community meetings and staff briefings.  Columnar ginkgo trees and pedestrian scale light columns frame the plaza creating shade, shelter and seasonal change, as the ginkgoes change from spring chartreuse to summer green, to autumn gold, to leafless winter tracery.

Softer Edges

The paving is a linear sandy-hues and modulated texture that unifies the ramp and entry plaza and continues into the lobby, in contrast to the darker, weighty brick of the building, planters and pre-cast seating. Soft elements up against the hard tile, aluminum and glass of the building’s entries help to humanize the passage from street to lobby, creating a more welcoming impression of public safety interaction.

Climate Forward

Along Sherman Avenue planters are intentionally designed to serve numerous functions – visual integration with the building, climate adaptation – reducing heat islands, slowing and treating stormwater, creating bird and butterfly habitat, providing visitor seating, and creating a defensible perimeter for public safety staff inside the building.  A series of raised rain gardens form an inviting and crenelated edge between public safety facility and public sidewalk.

The circulation is designed to create a building-sheltered paseo and a street level walkway with a threshold of rain gardens, raised planters and seating options to invite pedestrians to linger for conversation or meet at lunch time.  

Palette of Plantings

Diverse street tree plantings line all three of the frontages and help us to meet the City’s urban forestry plan goals through the selection of native California Sycamore and Arbutus and the use of pavement support systems to provide significant tree rooting area and stormwater reservoir for stormwater surges and infiltration.  A varied palette of habitat-producing understory plantings was developed: rain garden plantings, native and adapted grasses and flowering perennials, and shade tolerant courtyard plantings for the staff courtyard.  On Birch Street the emphasis is on ornamental grasses, flowering and ground covering perennials, and low shrubs. On Sherman species include open shrubs such as Western Redbud, primarily native grasses, sedges, rushes, and California native perennials.  On the Park Boulevard frontage plantings are composed of an alternating rhythm of rain gardens and meadow grasses and shade tolerant understory plants.

 

• Landscape