In 2007, thousands of homes and hundreds of businesses purchased CleanSteps SM Windpower from Washington Gas Energy Services helping to prevent the harmful effects of traditional energy supplies.  Joining this effort is a part of Floura Teeter’s commitment to a cleaner environment.  By using wind energy, we are helping the environnment, and also keeping the air clean, preventing the need for new, polluting fossil fuel power plants to meet growing energy needs.

This beach house getaway along Delaware’s Bethany shoreline by Alexander Design Studios needed a new way to tell the owners that the weekend had arrived.  With ocean waves and morning sunrises to the east, the owners asked for a landscape on the western side that would strengthen and enhance the architecture, linking the facade’s bold surfaces and central atrium while leading eyes and spirits toward the broader vista.  A new landscape entrance might serve as appetizer, groundwork for the panoramic views and salty ocean breezes to come.

While respecting the architect’s intent to turn interior spaces away from resort streets and developed lots, FTLA’s design uses the easily identifiable symbolism of a wood boardwalk, slicing across a pedestrian entryway and car port, to carry the theme of ocean getaway through to the house’s western facade.  The transecting walk, with black and gray horizontal banding that parallels the street-front, unifies the central atrium and flanking architectural volumes without demanding all of the attention.  New beach grasses and tree plantings add to the enlivening effect, transforming a house that seemed anchored into one that seems buoyed.

The breadth and scale of this site for a Fortune 200 company’s corporate headquarters easily has the power to impress if not overwhelm. Located in McLean Virginia, hard by the buzzing Capital beltway, the site included a multi-story office tower, conference center, grand boulevards, and six athletic fields—soccer, basketball, lacrosse, field hockey, and tennis. Amidst all this activity, it’s easy to see that the infrequent or out-of-town visitor might become a little disoriented when arriving for a one-day corporate conference.

Recognizing a need for employees to regroup and recoup, company captains hired FTLA to tone down the grand scale of the site and provide a few quiet nooks and niches. FTLA complied with a winding pathway that passes by several low, dry-laid stone walls. Here visitors can peer into bermed planting beds where rhododendron, cedar, bald cypress, rose, and daffodil help to refocus. The new walkway and its plantings don’t so much detract nor lessen the grandeur of the corporate campus, but help to steady and reorient, allowing a few perches from which to take it all in.

Partnering with New York landscape architects Thomas Balsley and Associates, Floura Teeter will lend local perspective and assist in an ambitious new redesign of the Inner Harbor’s Rash Field Park.  Located on the Inner Harbor’s south shore, the 9.3-acre site incorporates a new science park, formal and informal gardens, promontories, sports lawns, and even a recreational run for the family pet.  The park’s current beach volleyball courts and trapeze school will remain also, retooled and reintegrated into the design, guarantying continued use among the city’s many urban adventurers.

As an architectural element in the landscape, the park runs east and west along Key Highway and links the city’s heady Maryland Science Center with its breezy Visionary Arts Museum.  City leaders expect new park features to add one more “must see–must experience” to an Inner Harbor already rich in choice family activities.  For those who journey to the park from out of town, an added bonus will be the camouflaged parking structure with its 628-underground spaces.  Designed by Baltimore architects Ziger/Snead, the inconspicuous structure will receive a green roof design by FTLA, and Floura Teeter expects to blend the rooftop garden seamlessly into other park features, maintaining the Inner Harbor’s people and pedestrian friendly feel.

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Featured prominently in the recently published “Open Spaces Sacred Places,” FTLA’s design for “Thanksgiving Place” helps TKF Foundation tell the story of inspirational people and meditative landscapes.  This large format, colorfully illustrated volume by authors Tom Stoner and Carolyn Rapp highlights the dedicated “Firesouls” and fortuitous circumstances that brought 12 distinct landscapes and their varying programs to fruition.

FTLA’s design for”Thanksgiving Place,” a meditative garden serving Baltimore’s growing senior population, closes the book.  The story of Thanksgiving Place, as with the book’s 11 other featured projects, demonstrates how a personal commitment along with a love of nature can etch inspirational landscapes into places abandoned, neglected, or forgotten.  And how in the process of renewal, such places have the power to transform and enrich.

Learn more about TKF here www.tkffdn.org

Visit the book website here www.openspacessacredplaces.org

Patterson Park, one of the oldest parks in Baltimore City, has a rich history spanning some 300 years. The park offers numerous recreational features such as public pools, athletic fields and playgrounds, a boat lake, a skating rink, pavilions and acres of open space for strolling and picnicking. It also contains historic architectural gems like the Victorian Pagoda and Latrobe Marble Fountain.

The FTLA plans for the gateways include colorful native or adaptive plantings, brick walkways paved with the original 1853 park bricks and the creation of a tree canopy to demarcate the entrances. The plans also call for a restoration of the massive sandstone columns at each entrance. The objective of the design is to create a more defined gateway that beckons visitors to the park. FTLA’s plans achieve this by extending plantings further out onto the corners, improving curb ramps at crosswalks and insuring ADA accessibility, and replacing large areas of aging concrete with brick.

Preliminary designs were submitted to the City in spring 2008 and will allow for input from the Friends of Patterson Park, a non-profit membership organization that works to promote, protect and advocate for this community treasure. The Patterson Park Gateways are slated for completion in 2009.

Community Mediation Program is a non-profit organization that strives to reduce interpersonal conflict and community violence and animosity by increasing the use of non-violent conflict resolution strategies and making mediation more accessible. CMP has broken ground on the garden and it will be completed Summer 2008.

Learn more here www.tkffdn.org

Baltimore’s New East Side will eventually comprise an 80-acre, $800 million urban redevelopment effort that combines significant new business activity with new housing and a high level of human services. FTLA is the Landscape Architect for two new buildings in this East Baltimore Redevelopment project. Parkview at Ashland, a new 80 unit senior housing building, and Ashland Commons, a 78 unit workforce housing building. The buildings are separated by a brick courtyard offering a quiet place for residents of both buildings to join together and enjoy the outdoors. The design also includes terraces built off of the indoor community spaces, colorful ornamental plantings, and a walking path. The streetscape design calls for a combination of brick and concrete walkways, tree pits, lights, and signage. Construction complete 2007