In this unusual project, our client presented us with the challenge of defining two contiguous outdoor pedestrian spaces: one for walkers alongside a road with fast-moving traffic, the other a café patio in the shadow of buildings.
    We accomplished this by designing two arbors that mingle together naturally while scaling to the space they define: a taller and more dynamic arbor directly next to the street, where people would be in constant motion, and a shorter arbor next to the patio, where people would be sitting and relaxing. Our partner in this project, as with the Chicago Botanical Gardens, was Oehme van Sweden, the landscape design firm.
    A major challenge was finding the appropriate materials for the arbor. To achieve both grace and strength, we selected the same kind of aluminum used in telephone and lighting poles, which would be exported from the U.S. For the interconnecting "branches" at the top, in turn, we presented the client with two options: laminated wood and fiberglass.

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