Suffolk University expanded its Beacon Hill campus to include its first landscape space as part of a larger project that includes a new building housing laboratory and dining facilities. The landscape will be both a public open space, a forecourt for an adjacent state office building, and an exterior exhibition space for the school.

The existing site was a lifeless plaza that covered an existing parking structure at lower elevations and garage mechanical rooms at the upper elevations. The new landscape links these two levels with a planted and stepped slope that recalls the site’s original Beacon Hill topography and provides a place for seating and enjoying the space. The upper terraces make stronger connections to the university’s central administrative and classroom building across Ashburton Street, and an accessible path links the upper and lower portions of the site, providing accessibility to both levels over the fourteen-foot grade change.