Committed to Landscape
Since 2011, NBW has partnered with Georgia Tech to help shape a campus that reflects the institution’s academic, social, and ecological ambitions. Our work began with a framework for the 100-acre South-Central Sector and has since expanded across campus through a wide range of planning and built projects, including the Engineered Biosystems Building, the EcoCommons, the NxNE Sector Plan, the Thomas A. Fanning Student-Athlete Performance Center (Edge/Rice Concept Plan), First-Year Housing, and the Smith and Howell Residence Halls.
As a leader in higher education, Georgia Tech is committed to a landscape that does more than beautify. From stormwater management and cooling canopy cover to increased biodiversity and improved soil health, the campus landscape is a working system integrated with a network of paths, gathering spaces, and places for rest and reflection, including hammocks, slides, sculptures, and monuments.
In 2013, NBW developed the master plan for the South-Central Sector as part of the Institute’s 12-year campus plan. The framework established an integrated vision for stormwater infrastructure, ecological restoration, and academic engagement. Beneath decades of urban development, a buried creek and a complex social history, including moments from Georgia’s Civil Rights movement, offered opportunities to surface deeper narratives of resilience and renewal.
Engineered from the Outside In
In collaboration with Lake Flato Architects and local landscape architects JB + A, NBW led the landscape design for the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB), weaving it into the broader EcoCommons district and surrounding campus. The landscape accommodates a wide range of use, from quiet study areas along a rill to a shaded amphitheater for informal gatherings. Every feature is designed for both performance and experience. A watercourse along the building’s north façade manages stormwater, condensate, and building dewatering, while supporting native plantings and feeding into a constructed wetland. This system culminates in a textured rill and then a meandering channel through dense plantings and connects to the EcoCommons.
A Commons for All
The EcoCommons is Georgia Tech’s most ambitious standalone landscape project to date. Conceived as a living system for gathering, learning, and restoration, it supports sustainability goals and on-site research while offering an immersive, ecologically grounded experience. Nearly three years in the making, the eight-acre landscape restores hydrological function, reintroduces native Piedmont ecologies, and engages with a difficult, often-overlooked Civil Rights history rooted in the site.
Regrading the land allowed for the reestablishment of historic drainage patterns and creek flows, now traced by a boardwalk and watercourse moving through a wet meadow. Plantings strengthen remnants of the Piedmont mesic forest and foster biodiversity, while integrated fountains manage stormwater and invite sensory engagement.
The EcoCommons helps meet one of Georgia Tech’s primary sustainability goals by capturing and diverting millions of gallons of runoff from the city’s sewer system. The landscape offers generous spaces for community use, including a learning deck for outdoor classes, a hammock grove, topographic slides, and immersive native plantings.
Within the EcoCommons, Unity Plaza honors the agency and bravery of three students who, on this very site, then home to the notoriously segregated Pickrick Diner. put themselves at risk to uphold the newly passed Civil Rights Act, forever altering the course of history. Through NBW’s research and in partnership with the campus community, the design of the Plaza offers a space for reflection and remembrance and affirms the vital connection between environmental and social justice.
The EcoCommons reimagines what a university landscape can be: a place for learning, gathering, honoring memory, and cultivating both ecological and human resilience.
