Grain Collective’s experience is formed by collaborating at various capacities for more than a dozen years on several innovative urban projects around the world. These include the North Terrace Precinct Development, a $47m major urban design project in Adelaide, Australia, the Erie Canal Harbor Master Plan, Buffalo, NY, the IKEA waterfront in Brooklyn, NY and several rooftops projects in NY.

Each project we undertake, informs our experience deeply, be it understating the complex design issues for a large scale urban design and landscape project or dealing with the existing site based issues for a small residential project or a streetscape.
In brief, some of the key areas of focus and skills have been:

Landscape Architecture

• Master planning of urban and suburban parks, streetscapes and public spaces.
• Master planning and detailed design of cultural and eco-tourism developments.
• Master planning, design documentation and construction administration support for large scale waterfronts and mixed use developments. Design and Contract Documentation of hard and soft landscaping of residential, commercial and recreational building settings- courtyards, plazas and intensive and extensive green roofs.
• Design and contract documentation of small-scale recreational structures as part of landscapes.
• User needs studies and brief development studies.Interaction with several City and State agencies such as NYC Planning, NYC Department of Design & Construction (DDC), ESDC, NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) and NYC Art Commission
• Experience with LEED rated projects following USGBC guidelines.

Stakeholder engagement, Urban Design and Planning

• Stakeholder Engagement, Community Outreach
• Master plan visioning, strategy development, building programming, phasing studies
• Consensus-building, inter-agency coordination and public review processes
• Mixed-use retail and residential development- urban typology and density studies
• Streetscape and public realm design
• Architectural and sustainable design guidelines
• Graphic packages for public meetings, communication, public display installations
• Interaction with several City agencies such as NYC Planning, NYC Economic Development Corporation, NYC Department of Transportation, Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation, Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency
• Experience with LEED-ND (neighborhood design) projects following USGBC guidelines