This post is a continuation of our Little Free Library series, see the previous post and our first post that explains the project.

Studio Outsiders converged on the Mill City Neighborhood last weekend to construct our Little Free Library, the design of which has been in process over the last couple months. Mill City is neighborhood located to the southeast of Fair Park in South Dallas, and only about a 10-minute drive from the office!

Alendra, the steward of the Little Free Library and our point of contact, lives next door to the project site, on which she eventually envisions a community garden serving the neighborhood's residents. The Library is a great place to start, though, as sort of a "phase one" entry into the garden. As landscape architects, we were excited to be paired with a steward who already had in mind the integration of the built object and the garden surrounding it.

Our design incorporated a small terraced garden into the little library, sited adjacent to concrete steps left there from a house that used to sit on the lot. The stairs can easily be used as benches for readers of visitors to the garden to sit on, as well as eventually serving as an entry to the community garden. The Little Free Library is made from re-purposed materials, including cut cedar planks and a little red filing cabinet - all graciously donated by the coolest architectural surplus yard in Dallas called Orr-Reed Wrecking Co. The soil and mulch that we used was also donated by our friends at Soil Building Systems.

Check out more photos of the construction process for our Little Free Library below!

Photos by Charlie Pruitt, Amanda Frey, Allison Baker, Brian Halsell, Ellen Calhoun, Mark Thomas, and Peter Graves

Last Friday, the first park in Billingsley Company's mixed-use Cypress Waters development in north Dallas was officially opened with a ribbon cutting ceremony. Salazar Park, named after former city council member Steve Salazar, is a Studio Outside project meant to primarily serve the corporate tenants in three adjacent office buildings designed by Omniplan Architects.

The sun filtered through the newly-planted ginkgo trees as crowds of people found shade under low-branching live oak trees and three custom-designed park pavilions, one of which sheltered the band playing the event. The park is long and linear, providing a wide open space on one side and a small, enclosed grove of trees and pavilions on the other. The open space and lawn serves as a flexible event space, and also as a gallery of sorts for a wide variety of brightly-colored sculptural benches placed throughout the park.

As tenants start to move into the three-story buildings flanking the park, the maturing trees and shaded pavilions will provide a great place for outdoor meetings or lunches. A decomposed granite path surrounding the park provides a nice track for taking a leisurely morning walk.

There are two more parks to be built along Cypress Waters Blvd just north of Salazar Park and they are similar in scale. These open spaces will provide a recreational and green link between the office and corporate developments and the multifamily and mixed-use areas in Cypress Waters' Town Center. Additionally, a wide hike and bike trail connects the office, retail, multifamily, and mixed use developments to an extensive trail system surrounding North Lake, the largest and most important natural feature on the site.

Salazar Park, as the first open space along the entry sequence, is a welcoming green space that signals the beginning of a balance between buildings and landscape that the entire Cypress Waters development embodies.