BartonPartners Hosts International Visitors
March 24th, 2011
On Saturday, March 12, BartonPartners Architects Planners hosted a group of Japanese businessmen and developers from the Polus Group, a division of Chuo Green Development Co, Ltd. Headquartered in Koshigaya City, Saitama, next to Tokyo; the Polus group develops and builds mostly small and large infill, single-family developments near Tokyo. The development team, including Noriko Yamamoto of LA-based Global Link, was visiting the U.S. to look at planning, architecture, and landscape elements associated with traditional neighborhood developments. They have previously modeled one of their communities after Richmond, VA, a sister city to Saitama.
Among the visitors were Director Takahiro Kaino, Vice President of Design Shinichi Hashimoto, and eight other department heads. The day started at BartonPartners’ office in Norristown, PA where Tom Barton, owner and Principal of BartonPartners, led the group on a tour of the office. Bill Warwick, Principal at BartonPartners, then began a presentation on an overview of BartonPartners and their work. Dave Stembel, Senior Project Manager at BartonPartners, followed with a discussion about BartonPartners’ affordable-sustainable initiatives for single-family and multi-family developments. Doug Olsen, Landscape Architect at BartonPartners, finished the presentation with creative stormwater management and landscape issues.
From there, BartonPartners guided the group on a tour of four sites including Weatherstone in Chester Springs, Eagleview in Exton, and two BartonPartners-designed communities: Brinton Village and the Courtyards at Cherry Creek. The homes at Brinton Village, located in Thornbury Township, are designed with Craftsman and Cottage architectural design elements to reflect the area’s rural farmhouse style. The Courtyards at Cherry Creek, located in Brandywine, PA, is an active adult community of 119 carriage homes.
Both parties thought the visit was a very positive and valuable experience. “[BartonPartners] PowerPoint presentation was very informative and helped [Polus] to understand [BartonPartners] design philosophy and the projects,” Noriko Yamamoto stated. Bill Warwick commented, “It was an interesting opportunity to have an exchange of ideas with a different culture and to realize even though our countries are separated by great distances, a lot of our concerns about planning, architecture and landscape architecture are similar. We were able to learn from each other different ways of approaching these concerns to achieve better solutions.”