The Courtyard on the Square

The Courtyard on the Square transforms a 4,770-square-foot city-owned infill lot in downtown Mexico, Missouri into a small public room. The site is only 45 feet wide, enclosed on three sides, exposed to intense summer sun, and entered from a single street frontage. A separately funded mural, rendered by Monica and now being painted from her rendering, occupies the long north wall.

I built the project independently as a pro bono engagement. My work includes site and solar analysis, program definition, three design alternatives, the selected concept, mural rendering, public-safety and accessibility logic, planting strategy, phasing, line-item cost modeling, board-ready communication, visual direction, and the AI-supported workflow used to test design and budget decisions.

The courtyard needed to become welcoming, shaded, visible, accessible, and buildable without pretending that a limited budget could deliver the complete vision. The mural had already committed $24,500 of the available $50,000, leaving $25,500 for the park itself, while even the deliberately lean first phase was estimated at $35,642.

I used AI as a design-analysis partner, not as a substitute for landscape judgment. The workflow helped compare three spatial schemes against the same dimensions and budget, pressure-test solar exposure and sightlines, build an auditable phasing and cost model, and critique planting as costs changed. I measured spacing-to-spread ratios across the planting corpus and added a geometric guard so budget fitting could not silently break mature canopy closure.

The computational workflow tested a budget-fitting ladder that preserved plant identity, recurrence, and ground weave while adjusting counts and spacing. Corpus measurements showed that spacing pressure caused a real but secondary coverage loss compared with the larger program gap. A mature-closure guard was added to make that failure mode explicit and prevent the budget routine from accepting permanently open planting beds.

AI did not make the design. I built and directed the workflow and used it to test decisions; the landscape judgment is mine.

The work produced an 18-page board-review brief and companion budget model that separate the mural from the park, identify contributed work instead of treating it as free, and show exactly what each phase buys. The brief exposes a $10,142 Phase 1 shortfall, identifies concrete pricing as the most consequential unknown, and preserves later improvements without forcing rework into the first build. The mural is now being painted from the rendering.