Charged with the challenge of designing a high rise with a low lying city, Mixed_rise utilizes a variety of programs to accommodate the needs that were presented by the city as a whole. As a user approaches the building they are approached with two different programs, the recreation center and the office park. As the user moves up the building, they reach the apartment block and finally enter into the hotel, which occupies the top floors of the building. Within this project, the task was to work in a group of three to develop a three block set. Our group decided it was necessary to find an overall connecting feature which allowed for each of us to develop our own site in the way we saw fit. This feature was a large three block urban plaza. In my particular part of the site, that urban plaza continued from the street through the circulation of my building, culminating in a vertical garden that both separated and connected the residential blocks of the apartment.