SWAMP | TROPICA

The Swamp Campus best illustrates TROPICA’s wholistic design goals and shows our firm’s architectural, landscape, and interior design capabilities. In progress since 2019, the 4-acre campus is an adaptive re-use of a completely overgrown site and “dead” ecosystem, including two dilapidated historical structures.
TROPICA was hired to design and execute a complete transformation of the residential property which included 54 massive, invasive Australian Pines.
The Owner’s goal was to create gathering spaces and workspaces for a future, alternative school, which will include multiple residential buildings.
TROPICA’s design approach was three-fold:
1. Remove invasive plants and clean the lake water to create a native ecosystem to attract birds, pollinators, butterflies, and rejuvenate the natural environment that existed previously.
2. Restore the badly damaged existing buildings, preserving their character, while also increasing their capacity to house much larger programs.
3. Utilize the siting and form of the new residential buildings to provide an enclosure and defined “oasis” around the existing lake. Employ a Double -T construction to relate their structural system to the exposed column and beam systems of the existing buildings, and allow for wide-open shared living spaces.
Our interventions aim to work on the scale of the site, rather than on the scale of individual buildings.