Our premise is that there are two ways for sunken plazas to work successfully as people-gathering places: either 1) the plaza is an extension of the street – the sidewalk steps down at a corner, or across the width of the building, to ‘become’ the plaza (Citicorp Plaza, e.g., in New York) – sidewalk ‘slips’ into plaza, and you make the transition from one to the other without a second thought; or 2) the plaza, cut off from the street and suppressed below the street, glories in its separation and functions as an oasis, an enclave pulled away from the hectic city – the language of this type of plaza is different from that of the rest of the city, the plaza takes advantage of the hole it’s in to plant seeds, the plaza is a box of green inside the gray of the city (New York’s Rockefeller Center, e.g.). Our renovation of the courtyard collides and combines both approaches.

An open-tube sphere rises through the courtyard. It’s an upper part of the sphere, it’s a dome, the sphere is caught in the act of rising. Within the sphere, the floor pavers are removed and replaced with ground-cover; the ground inside the sphere bulges – it’s as if the sphere pulls the ground up as it pushes through the ground – it pushes through greenery and rises, like a bubble, in the middle of surrounding buildings. The lens-shaped openings between tubes are covered with mesh; from the ground-cover in the middle of the sphere, climbing plants spread over the mesh and enclose a globe – a world – of greenery inside the city.

Underground, one doorway from the concourse level opens onto a grating walkway; the walkway ramps up toward the sphere it enters the sphere and spirals up around the perimeter. At the edge of the walkway is a continuous bench; the seat is mesh, the railing behind it is extended up to make the back of the seat; here and there, niches are cut out of the bench to make places for wheelchairs. Cantilevered off the walkway are ‘islands’ floating in mid-air – islands to eat your lunch on. Each island is a circular platform, or a pair of platforms, or three platforms melded together. In the middle of each platform is a circular table, surrounded by a ring of seats; one seat is left out to leave a place for a wheel-chair; the seat and table are made of see-through mesh. You sit and eat in mid-air; you’re floating within an inverted bowl, a dome of plants.

Above-ground, on street-level, around the edge of the opening into the ground, the sidewalk stretches into the opening. On the street sides of the square, the sidewalk steps down toward the convex curve of the sphere; on the building sides of the sphere, the sidewalk steps up toward the convex curve of the sphere; the treads are the concrete of the sidewalk, while the risers are see-through mesh. At opposite corners, the sidewalk juts into the edge of the sphere (there’s a place for a wheel-chair here); the sidewalk rises and falls – you walk down and up and then down again, or up and down and then up again. You sit on the steps; on one side, you look down onto a curved green wall, you see through plantings into the enclave behind the wall – on the other side, you look out onto the plaza in front of the buildings.

Here and there, the surface of the sphere peels up, like the skin of an orange. You’re sitting opposite people inside the green world. You share the green world; the green that’s peeled up hangs like an awning over your head. The green globe has opened up like a flower; it’s blossomed -- the peels unfurl, like petals, they fly up to different heights in the air. One peel backtracks; it curls away from the globe and arches over the plaza between the sunken courtyard and the entrance-pavilion -- it descends into the small glass-enclosed sunken courtyard behind the pavilion. You walk under an arch of plantings that escapes from the globe like a spurt from a fountain.

The rising globe glows from within; a column of light rises through the middle of the globe. Around the column is a spiral staircase, that functions as an alternate means of egress, a ‘fire exit’ from the sphere; the stairway descends to a short ramp, that takes you over the mound of ground-cover and out through the second exit from the sunken courtyard..