James Rose Center and EarthCam receive Honor Award from NJASLA

The James Rose Center provided EarthCam with historical documentation and on-site consultation throughout the rehabilitation process.

The James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research + Design and EarthCam received an Honor Award in the category of Historical Preservation/Restoration for the Rehabilitation of the EarthCam headquarters landscape, formerly owned by Texwipe. Given to only a handful of projects each year, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) describe Honor Awards as representing the highest level of achievement distinguished by “superior professional accomplishment.”

James Rose’s original design for Texwipe’s corporate campus, completed in 1985 for Florence and Edward Paley, sat dormant for more than a decade when EarthCam’s founder and CEO, Brian Cury, discovered the decaying site on Memorial Day weekend in 2013. Although it was in disrepair, Cury, a trained filmmaker, immediately recognized its significance as a work of modern art.

“I knew right away it was special,” he noted. “I knew that instantly when I walked onto the property.” Long considered one of the maverick designers’s “lost” gardens, this late corporate project features vegetation, geometry, and materials characteristic of Rose’s palate. Sculptural broad-leaved evergreens; wooden, obtuse-angled retaining walls; swales lined with river stones; and meandering bluestone paths guide one through an always-changing, contemplative environment formed not by landscape “effects,” but by choreographing an experience of moving pictures and sensations within the site itself.

The James Rose Center provided EarthCam with historical documentation and on-site consultation throughout the rehabilitation process focusing specifically on the repair of essential infrastructure, precise reconstruction of bluestone paths, rebuilding of wooden landscape elements, and restoration of the site’s ecology. EarthCam used their custom webcam technology and artificial-intelligence based timelapse editing to create a three minute video that captured the entire restoration. Davis Brody Bond, in collaboration with Spacesmith and Vanessa DeLeon Associates managed the redesign of the site’s architecture helping once again restore views between office space and the garden, and thus the integral fusion of in- and outdoors characteristic of Rose’s work.

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