News

March 29, 2017 – The groundbreaking celebration for Frost Tower took place today at 10:00am, 111 West Houston Street in San Antonio, TX. Grant Stewart, Managing Principal, attended with members of the project team. 

Frost Tower is a welcome addition to the San Antonio skyline, which has not seen a new office tower since 1989. The project is part of an ongoing revitalization of downtown San Antonio, and will connect San Pedro Creek and the adjacent Frost Park through the creation of a promenade along Houston Street. The 400,000 sq. ft. tower is designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli for Weston Urban and its development partner KDC.

"Excitement is a word too-often used at groundbreakings, but after all of the work, time and manpower that went into the intricate public-private partnership agreement among Weston Urban, the City of San Antonio and Frost Bank, it's a valid one to describe the start of one of the city's largest developments." writes Katie Burke for the San Antonio Business Journal. GGN is pleased to be working with this exceptional team.

Photo: Mayor Ivy Taylor speaks at the groundbreaking (photo credit: Grant Stewart)

March 21, 2017 – Shannon Nichol is the 2017 John R. Bracken Lecturer and Exhibitor at the Penn State Department of Landscape Architecture.

The exhibit of Shannon’s process drawings, titled “Repair Works,” is open today, March 21 at the Stuckeman School's Rouse Gallery. The exhibit features two projects, Lower Rainier Vista & Pedestrian Land Bridge at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA and the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park in Chicago, IL. Free to the public, the gallery is open from 9am – 4pm each weekday, and the exhibit will run through the end of May.

The lecture, to be delivered on Wednesday, March 22 from 6:00 – 8:00pm at the Stuckeman Jury Space, will build on the “Repair Works” theme of the exhibit. “GGN is particularly interested in design work that does not bestow a novel layer of design onto a clean-slate site, but, instead, strategically repairs a ‘messy and broken’ transitional space in a city,” says Shannon. “Novel solutions can be found by fixing the old, in situ systems and designs of a highly altered site.”

The Penn State Department of Landscape Architecture lecture series, which began in the spring of 1982, honors Dr. Bracken, who was among the first to graduate from Penn State with an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture. Dr. Bracken served as department head from 1924 to 1957 and active professor emeritus until 1979.

March 8, 2017 – Lesia Mokrycke is exhibiting work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Ross Gallery in Philadelphia. The group show, Landscape / Soundscape, explores the desire to unite image and sound through compelling pairings of photographs and soundscapes. The exhibit is on display through March 26.

Sound artists from throughout the United States and United Kingdom were invited to create soundscapes in response to photographs from Penn’s University Art Collection.  In tandem with Landscape / Soundscape, Lesia was selected through a juried selection of MFA projects to show her photograph titled Passage with an accompanying sound piece on the gallery’s digital interactive kiosk.

Lesia’s work, Passage, investigates landscape as a line walked between two undisclosed sites in Alberta’s boreal forest.  These routes of travel form connections between places, but they also point toward layers of history and time.  Traversals across landscapes mark points of orientation, inform decisions made at critical moments along a journey, and embody the implications of choices made and enacted.  A path is not just a line drawn across the surface of the ground, it is also a cultural expression.