Nowadays is an outdoor performance venue and hangout spot from the team behind well-loved Brooklyn dance parties Mister Sunday and Mister Saturday Night, offering cold beer, fresh food, and communal, backyard vibes. Future Green’s design takes its cues from the ecology of this post-industrial site and transforms it into a relaxed, park-like setting for all-ages performance and play.

The central feature of the garden is a padded, multi-use dance floor that accommodates hundreds of dancers on Sunday afternoons. A formal grid of honey locust trees surrounds the floor, offering filtered shade and a leafy canopy to relax beneath. The trees were also selected for their ability to phytoremediate the soil, accumulating heavy metals like lead through their root system over time. Inspired by a public art installation by Katharina Grosse, our design literally highlights the site’s spontaneous, successional plants with brightly colored eco-paint. We supplemented the site’s forest perimeter with sumac, gray birch, and quaking aspen trees, and continued this language in crafting informal seating with grassy mounds and sustainable, black locust-wood platforms and benches. Our innovative approach to planting design was featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine as “making the case for using weeds in design,” while “also for appreciating the role they play in urban nature.”