Winter 2012

Recognized by the NY ASLA Chapter for a 2012 Honor Award, HM White’s landscape and living roof design for the conference center in King Abdullah’s Financial District represents state-of-the-art technological and design innovation applied to the dynamic fusion of landscape and building. HM White has invented a new modular planting system as part of SOM’s “exoskeleton” building skin to solve inherent complex growing conditions using a custom hypertufa growing medium and a capillary layering system to emulate natural limestone cliff growing habitats.  For the first time in a Saudi Arabian public landscape design, native arid grasses and flora are introduced into a large scale public space setting where indigenous plant communities spatially organize and blur the boundaries between the building's undulating skin and HM White’s surrounding structural desert landscape design.