Innovation Lab
Pro bono
Pro bono
Making impact in our communities
Members of the BASE team donate a portion of our work to initiatives aligned with our mission, vision, and values. Listed below is a selection of our current pro bono projects.
Central Freeway Removal, San Francisco
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BASE is a member of the team rethinking the Central Freeway. This effort addresses issues of environmental justice and proposes returning approximately 50 acres of land to open space, housing, cultural amenities, and the restoration of Mission Creek to provide ecological and recreational benefits.
The design firms leading this pro-bono effort, that could be the City’s signature transformative program, are Multistudio and BASE Landscape Architecture.
Rio Yaque del Norte, Dominican Republic
BASE worked in collaboration with APEDI and USAID on the conceptual design of a Water Park pavilion in the Central Park of Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. The Water Park is an exhibition about the Yaque del Norte river basin along a route of approximately 500 m. The tour includes:
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5 models or models at different scales representing the entire basin and 4 cuts of the river: the source (Pico Duarte), the urban part (Santiago), the agricultural part (Amina) and the mouth into the Atlantic Ocean (Monte Cristi).
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5 stations representing the dams and the main crops associated with the river: tobacco, bananas, rice and coffee.
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A small canal representing the water cycle of the Yaque del Norte River.
Pinole Creek, Pinole CA
The Pinole Creek Watershed is an unique watershed whose waters flow through the East Bay hills and the town of Pinole before entering the San Pablo Bay. As Pinole Creek flows down to San Pablo Bay, it picks up a disheartening amount of trash due to littering and illegal dumping of household trash and larger items such as furniture and vehicle tires.
The Creek offers opportunities to increase social and ecological connectivity along its entire length, inviting the people of Pinole to celebrate the water, the riparian vegetation and the rainbow trouts. BASE is working in collaboration with Friends of Pinole Creek Watershed and engaging with students from Pinole High School to make a creekside park concept plan.
Wilshire Riverside Little League, Portland OR
BASE collaborated with Scott Edwards Architecture, Axiom Custom and K&E Excavating on the design of a new entryway for the Wilshire Riverside Little League’s home stadium in Portland, Oregon.
Since the space was gifted to Riverside Little League in the late 1950s, this field has been a special place in NE Portland. In 2018, the WRLL Board set in motion the 2025 WRLL Vision plan, which defined the need for a proper entryway. Just as Fenway Park has Jersey Street, Riverside Park will have Wilshire Way, flanked by a donor-brick pathway that will grow with future generations of youth baseball players and their families.
Project partners:
Scott Edwards Architecture
Harper Houf Peterson Righellis
Axiom Custom
K&E Excavating
Wilshire Riverside Little League
Salinas River, Salinas CA
BASE is supporting the Salinas River Project. The design problem of this project is the tension between nature and society, instrumental and intrinsic values, that have caused environmental degradation of the river and overexploitation of resources and vulnerable communities. This tension is evident along the Salinas River: a highly modified and controlled river, a “working river”, with no associated intrinsic value. For this reason, it is necessary to redraw the borders of the river - that have been drastically modified by human activities- to give more room for the river itself - its dynamics and processes, its capacity to restore itself - and to present a set of different possibilities, as scenarios or strategies, where the river and the people can flourish together.