Landscape Planning for Trinity Lutheran Campus

Trinity Lutheran Church approached SZABO Landscape Architecture with a challenge common to established faith communities. The campus had evolved incrementally over decades, with facilities and outdoor spaces that no longer cohesively supported the congregation's growing programs and vision. SZABO provided a comprehensive master plan that could hold the full complexity of the campus's future in a single, well-reasoned framework.

SZABO was retained by two separate architectural teams to provide landscape architecture services across both the institutional and residential components of the expansion. The scope included a new sanctuary, new high school, renovated playgrounds and athletic fields, expanded parking and circulation, and a new senior living center organized around a richly programmed central courtyard at the northern portion of the site.

The master planning process began with a close reading of the site's constraints and opportunities. The existing facilities had grown organically over time, resulting in fragmented connections, underperforming outdoor spaces, and limited ability to accommodate the drop-off, parking, and pedestrian flow demands of a campus serving congregants of all ages. Early feasibility studies tested how the full program could be distributed across the site while maintaining clear functional zones and a unified landscape character.

For the school precinct, the design introduced reorganized outdoor recreation areas including basketball courts, multi-use athletic fields, a rubberized playground, a water play feature, and a discovery track. These spaces support student life between and after classes while improving the legibility and safety of the drop-off sequence.

The senior living component received particular design attention. Developed through two distinct concept schemes, the residential buildings are arranged to create a protected interior courtyard. Outdoor rooms within the courtyard include a bocce lawn, water feature, shaded lounge and seating areas, raised garden beds, BBQ and dining terraces, and a contemplative memorial garden. The landscape was designed to give residents meaningful daily access to the outdoors: spaces for gathering, for quiet, and for the kind of purposeful outdoor activity that supports health and community belonging.

At the full-campus scale, the landscape plan addressed site-wide continuity with a consistent palette of street trees, ornamental plantings, lawn areas, and hardscape that unifies the institutional and residential zones while meeting land use and parking requirements. Planting selections were guided by low-water use and drought tolerance principles appropriate to Central Oregon's high desert climate.