NationsBank Plaza roof garden
By David Driapsa
A collaboration of Harry Wolf, Architect, Wolf Architecture, Los Angeles, California USA and Daniel Urban Kiley, Landscape Architect, Office of Dan Kiley, Charlotte, Vermont USA
In 1988, landscape architect Daniel Urban Kiley and architect Harry Wolf, FAIA, completed the design of a rooftop garden and what many consider one of the most important and complete modernist collaborations between a landscape architect and an architect. Kiley, who was a master of modernistic landscape architecture known for exceptional elegance and spatial clarity such as the Miller House and Garden landscape, teamed up with architect Harry Wolf, a master modernist architect, to collaboratively design a roof top garden for the new regional headquarters of the North Carolina National Bank (NCNB). Wolf selected the site at 400 North Ashley Drive in Tampa, Florida, and NCNB convinced City officials to sell a public rose garden and parking structure that occupied the site for the new bank to be, as CEO Hugh McColl declared, the “finest banking hall in Florida.” The 3.5-acre roof top garden sits atop a parking garage and is integrated with Wolf’s cylindrical, 33-story office tower and 7-story cubical banking hall overlooking the Hillsborough River. The roof top garden provided a public amenity in downtown Tampa.
The building program consisted of the 33-story, 513,000-square foot cylindrical office tower, two 6-story cube pavilions, and the elevated garden built over a two-story parking garage.
The formal, geometric landscape of the roof top garden is one of Kiley’s most seminal urban works and epitomizes the International Modernist Landscape aesthetic for which he was a renowned pioneer. The integration of the rooftop garden with the office tower and banking hall complex is a stunning example of the accomplishment of a master landscape architect and a master architect working collaboratively.
Wolf and Kiley worked together to devise a cohesive plan that extends the carefully worked-out geometrically proportioning system of the building complex into an intricate pattern of trees, palms, turfgrass, stone and concrete paving, fountains, pools, and runnels of the roof top garden. It is a form of sacred geometry that also draws in the surrounding street grid of the city. The result is dazzling and won international acclaim before its early demise.
The entire 4.5 site was subjected to Wolf’s geometrical patterning system (an organic pattern that Wolf referenced to shells found in local waters). The geometry of the building, fenestration, and interior space is based upon the mathematical proportioning system of the Fibonacci scale. Interior and exterior dimensions and the frequency of window openings conform to the mathematical sequence of numbers in which each number in the series is the sum of the previous two prime numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 13, and so forth.
Kiley collaborated with Wolf to incorporate that same proportional system in the design of the roof top garden, resulting in a mathematical synthesis of vertical architectural and horizontal landscape architectural elements in a powerful and cohesive design.
Pedestrians entering the plaza from North Ashley Drive walk up a short flight of steps to an arrival terrace eight feet above street level before ascending further to the roof top garden above the two-level parking garage.
The lower arrival terrace featured a segmented 78- by 39-foot reflecting pool set flush to the pavement. Planters in the pool featured large trees (Live Oak - Quercus virginiana) under planted with a low shrub mass (Ilex vomitoria Nana - Dwarf Yaupon Holly). The still water mirrored the glass cube of the cubical banking hall.
The roof garden is divided into east-west rectangular grass panels each 78 feet wide in varying lengths, with 13-foot wide paved pathways between. Reflecting the mathematical proportions of the office tower, the distance between the rows of palm trees were spaced on the 78 feet radius of the cylindrical tower, and the 13 feet wide walkways are same ceiling height as the interior rooms in the tower. The pavement and grass checkerboard pattern of the roof top garden is more than eye-catching: it extends the geometry of the building complex as an organic composition found in nature, such as the patterns of a pine cone and seashell.
The garden resembles a tapestry designed with influences of the 17th-century work of André Le Nôtre and Moorish paradise gardens of trickling water, as in the Alhambra in Spain. Reflecting pools and paving patterns mirrored the vertical planes of the building complex. One hundred thirty-five cabbage palms (Sabal palmetto) formed allées lining paths. 800 purple and white flowering Crape Myrtle trees (Lagerstroemia indica) of organic form appeared randomly planted within the grid, and the turfgrass was planted between the checkerboard of pavers blurred the walkway-lawn edges.
An “exquisitely detailed” water garden of reflecting pool and long stone runnels recalling Moorish gardens circulated water to low circular fountains that animated the space with movement and quieted noises from the street.
Park visitors standing on the street saw only the long lower terrace of the wedge-shaped roof garden, divided by the 400-foot-long, glass-bottom water canal that flowed with splashing water and passed dappled light into the garage and onto the paving below through a translucent glass bottom. The garage roof top was designed “like a private garden” refuge. Its entrance was framed, ceremonially, by long ramps. On its far side along the river, an amphitheater provided a contemplative space to watch the sun set behind the onion domed towers of the historic Plant Hotel on the campus of the University of Tampa.
Less than a year after the opening, water began leaking into the parking garage below requiring the pools to be rebuilt. By the early 1990s water damage to the parking structure below became apparent. An engineering report estimated in 1999 that repairs would cost $2.5 million. By 2000 the leakage had grown so troublesome that runnels, fountains, reflecting pools, and water gardens were abandoned. The city struggled to maintain the deteriorating roof top garden, but problems were evaluated so severe that the roof top garden faced demolition.
Maintenance essentially ceased and the roof top garden became overgrown with weeds. Paving cracked and shifted hazardously. The roof top garden was a modern masterpiece in ruin, an urban blight slated for redevelopment. In 2005, it was on the top ten list of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation Most Endangered Historic Places in Florida, gained the attention of Kiley admirers from around the world, who advocated for its preservation. In 2006, hundreds of the crape myrtle trees were removed and in 2007 the roof top garden was closed through early 2010 while repairs to the garage were underway.
NationsBank Plaza is considered to be among Kiley’s most iconic works and an exceptionally important work of modern landscape architecture. The Miller Garden in Columbus, Indiana, and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, both by Kiley, are National Historic Landmarks.
What remains of the plaza is in Kiley’s name only. The future of the roof top garden is uncertain. The parking garage underwent $4.7 million in rehabilitation in 2010 and the roof top was partially rehabilitated using Kiley’s original drawings from archives at Harvard University. The result is a barren sun-blasted flat checkerboard of concrete, limestone and turf grass.
Gone are the primary allées of Cabbage Palms. They no longer establish their dominance within the landscape. Plans to replace them have stalled. Gone are the groves of crape myrtle trees. The white and pink flowers no longer provide splashes of color, except for a clump surviving on the southwestern corner. Plans to replace them have stalled. Gone is the sound of flowing water. There are no plans to replace the water. A small section of the canal still exists between the cube and cylindrical tower. Gone are the reflecting pools on the lower terrace, removed and paved over for vehicular drop-off and turn-around.
Critics claimed the plaza was impractical, too expensive to maintain, and rarely used. Others advocate for a full restoration of this iconic landscape, to return the partially rehabilitated checkerboard patterned grass and paver space to the iconic modernistic masterwork of urban park design as it existed on opening day.
David J Driapsa Landscape Architect
(239) 591-2321
Please visit www.davidjdriapsa.com for more information
Registered Professional Landscape Architect, Florida LA0001185
(C) Copyright 1993-2016 David J Driapsa