Cummins Station, USA – A Swiss pearl for the world

Dividing Fence

The Track 13 Community Garden renovation transforms a defunct loading dock into a luxurious outdoor amenity. The site is situated in a sliver of space between Cummins Station, a historically registered industrial warehouseturned corporate office building, and the Gulch, one of downtown Nashville’s thriving neighbourhoods.

The building once accommodated freight trains, but now hosts a wide spectrum of uses ranging from impromptu business and casual lunch conversations to corporate events, concerts and wedding receptions.

The long, linear garden space is subtly divided into three zones: the Track 13 platform and art gallery, the Lawn, and the Grove. A dynamic relationship exists between the artificial and the natural, the planned and the experienced, the temporary and the permanent as the garden space oscillates between its parts and the fluid unity of the whole. The thread of continuity that links these parts together is the central element of this project: a freestanding fence structure that defines the Garden’s edge. A palette of three Swisspearl 12mm double-sided panel sizes and colors are fastened to the fence’s 375 foot (114 m) steel frame.

The black, white and grey pattern emerges as an abstract mosaic greater than the sum of its parts. The sleek, distinctly horizontal design evokes the memory and movement of the locomotives that once rolled through the site.