Honoring the past, designing the future
1881 Farm Park is a 10-acre community and regional flex space located on the centennial homestead of Henry and Anna Windler. In collaboration with Shape Architecture Studio, Superbloom is developing a vision that seeks to reconnect us with the delicate agricultural systems of the American West.
Leveraging ancient holistic practices and innovative new sustainable technologies, 1881 will be a working agricultural campus and destination for local food. We imagine this park as a dynamic ecosystem of people, plants, and animals that work in harmony to build healthy soils and systems. This project broke ground in September, 2022, a step closer to bringing this vision to life.
The Windler Homestead and 1881 Park will be an iconic agricultural exploratorium for the Windler community, the City of Aurora and the Denver Metropolitan region at large. The design imagines a regenerative landscape that incorporates restored prairie grasslands and pasture, agriculture, food production, greenhouses and permaculture.
As a new center for communal and collaborative life, the community will experience history and nature through a direct connection to their food. They can see, taste and even participate in growing and harvesting an abundance of foods that are uniquely adapted to Colorado’s climate and seasons. The rich experience and deep connection with food production and the land becomes a lifestyle at Windler. The farm will serve as a living seed library, expanding access to diverse and exciting heritage varieties; an on-site market and farm-to-fork restaurant offer seasonally rotating produce, meats, cheeses and flowers. The park in turn will be a catalytic center for the new walkable and bikeable neighborhoods at Windler, providing a circuit of play spaces throughout for visitors to explore and to encourage active lifestyles. A diversity of landscape types are created using native trees, shrubs and perennials that are highly adapted to the plains landscape of Aurora.
To ensure the success of the farm park, water and soil conservation are essential. The design team continues to research additional ways to design site-appropriate sustainable resource systems for flexible, dynamic and porous spaces and surfaces that amplify the availability of water resources. The designs will synthesize closed-loop, water-optimized systems and rotational planting strategies based on best practices for dryland land management.