UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
HEALTH SCIENCE CAMPUS

Based on the idea of a medicinal garden, the landscape for University of Waterloo’s new School of Pharmacy centres around a courtyard of perennials and shrubs that expand into a library garden of healing trees.  Though not exotic, the selected vegetation species have their hidden powers: Gingko as aid for blood circulation in the elderly, White Willow as early source of aspirin, Linden as diuretic and sedative, Chestnut as treatment for hemorrhoids, and Hawthorn as remedy for angina.  The plants and pathways stitch the downtown campus into the city fabric to create an urban green space of living medicine.
A gesture of roots extends from the courtyard as a profuse and random tangle, in reference to the role that plants have had in the history of pharmaceuticals.  The pedestrian scale of the urban context is linked through a walkway bordered by two staggered rows of Accolade Elms that descend towards a plaza at the School’s principal entrance. 
Buffering the transitions between the phased construction is proposed a temporary garden to animate the windowed corridor along what will ultimately become the courtyard, and screen out an adjacent plain of temporary parking.  Nearly one thousand whips of fast-growing trembling aspen will be planted to create a living volume of sticks that will compete with each other in a veritable match of survival of the fittest. 

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