Project Name: Urban Outfitters

Project Location: Philadelphia, PA

Date of Installation: June 2010

Project Goals: Aesthetics, Floating Gardens

Project Details:

Working with project partners, DIRT Studio of Charlottesville, VA and Innovative Marine Solutions of Breinigsville, PA BlueWing provided Urban Outfitters with floating wetland gardens in the shape of the letters URBN (its stock symbol).  These letters are placed in an old US Navy dry dock at the Philadelphia Naval yard.  This dry dock is the heart of a renewed historic core of the 400-acre Navy Yard that contains five industrial buildings retrofitted for the design studios and corporate offices. The central dry dock serves as a public civic landing for Philadelphia’s Broad Street axis culminating at the Delaware River. The landscape infrastructure builds upon the industrial scale of the Navy Yard while overlaying a rich texture of Urban Outfitters’ sensibility.

At an average size of 360 square foot per letter, each letter is made up of BioHaven Floating wetland modules and planted with more than 1000: Spartina patens, Hibiscus moscheutos, Lobelia siphilitica, Lobelia cardinalis and Iris versicolor.  Each letter is contained within a aluminum frame that is connected to the other letters and to aluminum booms stretching across the dry dock to maintain proper letter spacing. There is also welded aluminum fencing to prevent waterfowl from lighting on the letters. All manufacturing and frame work was performed by Innovative Marine Solutions.

Launch Pictures