Founders Green
An underused civic plaza becomes the city's busiest public space
Madison WI
Civic
The plaza sat between a library, a transit stop, and a row of ground-floor retail, and none of them made real use of it. The space had hard paving, no shade, and nowhere to sit that didn't feel like an afterthought. We reduced the paved area by a third, introduced a canopy of shade trees at a scale the surrounding buildings had never had, and gave the space a reason to be crossed slowly rather than through. It's now the most-booked public space on the city's parks calendar, used for markets, readings, and lunch hours alike.
