The Commercial Design Award of Excellence is given for the restoration of the Texwipe/EarthCam Headquarters, a rare corporate project by avant-garde landscape architect James Rose, who initiated landscape architecture’s “modern revolution” in the 1930s. Constructed in 1985 on 10 acres of land in Northern New Jersey, Rose created his distinctive obtuse-angled, interlocking “space-form,” using pressure-treated landscape timbers. His choreographed landscape “meanders” like a stream through the modulating space, punctuated by pagoda-like bluestone lanterns, “rock ikebana,” and tree-root sculptures. When Texwipe relocated in 2001, the site was left abandoned until 2013, when EarthCam’s CEO discovered and purchased the campus. As with many of Rose’s projects, little documentation existed, so the restoration began with a survey, using aerial drone technology provided by EarthCam to pinpoint the precise forms, locations and orientations of Rose’s irregular site features. The project repaired and revitalized one of the few surviving works of an important modern landscape pioneer and challenges the popular myth that modernism and environmentalism are at cross purposes.

EarthCam

The James Rose Center, EarthCam, Davis Brody Bond, Spacesmith, Vanessa DeLeon Associates