California’s State Capitol building includes a park considered one of the most beautiful State Capitol grounds in the country. Spanning 40 acres—12 city blocks—with lush vegetation and gardens, it also features memorials and monuments that present California’s history. With the Capitol undertaking an extensive building renovation, the State needed a firm with extensive knowledge of developing mitigation recommendations for landscape resources and expertise working on politically sensitive public projects involving multiple stakeholders.

The cultural landscape treatment report contextualized the historic capitol building within the surrounding 160-year-old historic park, teasing out significant design themes for the and re-evaluating the Capitol Complex using a cultural landscape lens to identify both contributing and non-contributing landscape features.

With the park’s resources properly identified and documented, the preservation treatment approach developed creative site-specific recommendations that respond to both the character of the historic landscape and the goals of the renovation project at the Capitol. Since the report was developed simultaneously with construction documents, MIG worked with the client and the designers to sensitively incorporate priority character-defining features into design development documents. The multidisciplinary effort aligned with the process of creating a more functional Capitol Building for the people of California while minimizing the impacts to the historic landscape.