1997 - After Tilted Arc was removed, GSA retained award-winning landscape architect Martha Schwartz to redesign Foley Square Plaza. 

1997 - The plaza is an open space with distinctive features such as the six-foot tall, grassy hemispherical topiaries 

1997 - Hand rails with spiral designs run along the stairs leading from the street level to the plaza.  

1997 - Schwartz used bright colors in components of her design  

1997 - Green curvilinear benches placed in a serpentine pattern around the topiaries 

1997 - Orange mesh trashcans. 

1997 - By 2008, the roof membrane of the 40-year-old garage below the plaza was failing. To fix it, Schwartz's design had to be removed.  

1997 -  

2013 - The scale on the ground is intimate 

2013 - Combining elements of a public square and a garden 

2013 - A GSA project to be funded by President Obama's 2009 stimulus package 

2013 - The plaza is organized with four mounded, sinusoidal plant beds. 

2013 - The organic forms embrace buttery marble benches'some discs, others rectangular slabs. 

2013 - A fountain emerges from the pavement on the northeast corner.  

2013 - The grayness of the site in the winter, ends in the spring with an explosion of blooms on the Saucer Magnolia Trees 

2013 - The marble on the benches were handpicked from a Vermont quarry. 

2013 - The cobbles, patterned to be a 'jazzy riff' on the woven checkerboard facade of the Federal Building, help soften the space.  'It's sort of like the facade reflected in water'

2013 - Public plazas are difficult to design and program'in-between spaces that are neither park nor street.  Van Valkenburgh says that the plaza's previous incarnations reflect 'an evolving idea of life in cities and urbanity.' Tilted Arc exemplified the 1960s and '70s idea of sculpture as landscape's salvation. The plaza's transformation continues with MVVA's scheme. 'Although our designs are not very similar in a spatial or material sense, Martha's thinking about habitation and the need to create a sense of welcome definitely influenced our approach,' he says. 'In this way, I feel like our work is an extension of what she was doing.'

1969 - Jacob K. Javits Federal Building  The Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building at 26 Federal Plaza on Foley Square in the Civic Center neighborhood of Manhattan houses many federal government agencies. At over 41 stories, it is the tallest federal building in the United States.

1981 - Tilted Arc  Removed after a lengthy and very public battle and court case pitting Richard Serra against the GSA over artists rights to their installed 'site-specific' works. A controversy developed over the artwork by Richard Serra commissioned for the plaza in front of the building, Tilted Arc. Commissioned in 1979 and built in 1981, it was criticized both for its aesthetic values and for security reasons. It was removed in 1989, which resulted in a lawsuit and a trial. The piece remains in storage, as the artwork was site-specific, and the artist does not want it displayed in any other location. The removal and trial led to the creation of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990.