OLIN is working with architects Foster + Partners and developer Liberty Property Trust on media giant Comcast’s second tower in Philadelphia. The tower will be the tallest building in the United States outside of Chicago and New York City. It is conceived as a vertical campus serving a diverse variety of uses, including Comcast’s research and development departments, television studios for NBC, and a 12-story luxury hotel at the top of the building overlooking Benjamin Franklin Parkway. OLIN’s landscape design for the tower responds to the planning of publicly accessible program elements at street level including the hotel entrance, a streetside restaurant, and a large winter garden (incorporating OLIN’s planting design of twelve 30-foot tall tropical specimen trees) to create a vibrant, tree-lined streetscape. The paving and furnishings are designed to coordinate with the landscape of Comcast’s existing tower, also designed by OLIN, while having a unique identity that relates to the architecture. The whole forming a public generously scaled granite campus space across the intervening street that connects the two buildings.
