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RNL’s Landscape Architecture studio worked with two internationally recognized artists, Larry Kirkland and Robert Murase, on Denver’s new Wellington Webb Municipal Office Building and its main entry plaza facing Civic Center Park.

At the plaza in front of the main entrance is a Double Head Sculpture, facing east and west, symbolizing Denver’s past and its future. Between the heads hangs a surveyor’s plumb bob, signifying “plumbing the depths of the mind,” and the plaza’s granite paving circulates the plumb bob in the form of a surveyor’s target.

The design of the plaza positions the City of Denver in the larger world. Denver’s geographic position is represented by two wide, bi-axial granite bands suggesting longitude and latitude, crossing beneath the head sculpture.

Civic topographies are built upon such imaginary lines, surveyor’s lines, which translate a culture’s ideas, values, and dreams into constructions. The granite bands are inscribed with Denver’s latitude and longitude, text and images related to Denver, images and text describing places which share Denver latitude and longitude, near the 40th Parallel and the 105th Meridian.