Commercial Services
People sense when they are in a well designed and maintained environment.
This is key to a commercial development where buildings, signage and functional areas such as parking and pathways must aesthetically fit into the landscape or neighborhood or become the neighborhood itself.
GLA incorporates high design quality, preservation of open spaces and innovative environmental protection while meeting the goals of our clients and project owners.
Master Planning
Highland II Corporate Park presented a challenge of grading that has resulted in providing sites for high technology research corporations within a wooded environment that features spectacular views of the surrounding countryside. The roadways and drainage systems were compatibly designed to ensure retention of the aesthetic quality of goals set forth by the developers.
Corporate Parks
The Warwick Executive Park is a first class suburban office park stationed on a steep hillside adjacent to an interstate highway. GLA prepared all concept and implementation procedures to create a naturalistically graded and planted landscape project. The park is deserving of it popular name, The Summit. A significant task for GLA was design of all project graphics. This included all internal wayfinding and regulatory signage and also completed detailing of the main entrance feature.
Planned Community
A master planned enclave of seven custom homes located in Narragansett, Rhode Island overlooks the Atlantic Ocean. GLA also designed the residences themselves to ensure complete harmony between the layout of the living spaces and the opportunities of the site. The site grading of Moonraker has sculptural quality that creates private outside areas for family activities as well as open lawns for social events. GLA’s multi family expertise creates economic vitality in this high-end residential projects.
Universities & Schools
Competition among private universities and schools provides the need and the opportunities for GLA to enhance educational institutions with marketable high quality landscapes. GLA believes that the quality of the learning environment is fundamentally as important as the content of the curriculum. In differentiating our educational clients from their competition, GLA’s campus planning and creative landscapes engender memorable experiences, while designed to thrive in diverse climates with heavy use and limited maintenance.
Adaptive Re-Use
Sustainable architecture and LEED Certification requirements are driving owners of older properties to find new uses, new tenants, and new income streams to create balanced budgets. The landscapes of these types of projects, often accomplished with historic tax credits, make or break their market appeal. GLA searches for the best possible opportunities of site, people, vehicles, and transportation to focus viable but expended space toward society’s contemporary and future needs.
Waterfront Development
Because people enjoy being close to water, GLA believes in the power of water to enliven urban settings. Developments along urban waterfronts are most successful when people can experience the waterfront environment at close range and see the water from many viewing points. GLA’s visualization skills facilitate planning, design, permitting and construction of beautiful urban waterfronts. GLA’s landscape architects possess the creativity to create useful, active, safe and affordable experiences within any waterfront setting.
Botanical Gardens
Gates, Leighton & Associates, Inc. prepared the master plan and design character sketches for the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. The primary objective was the integration of public facilities and the natural landscape in a manner that would foster a natural sense of serenity and learning. The plan itself became a teaching tool for environmentally sensitive development.
GLA always enjoys complimenting our landscapes with signs and graphics that reinforce the overall design intent. GLA’s designs have included major identifying features, site directories, interpretive panels and regulatory signage. Insightful specifications of materials, colors, scale and character are a hallmark of GLA’s graphic designs. Because exterior graphic signage programs need to be closely related to their landscape architectural settings, GLA prefers to oversee the design of both components.
