As Houston’s Downtown has developed and expanded over many decades, public green space has been increasingly constrained by several interstate routes: primarily I-59, -45, and -69. These thoroughfares, while essential for commuters, have left little room for workers and nearby residents to enjoy unimpeded access to their locale’s adjacent trailways and bayous, and the benefits of a temperate, if flood-prone, climate.
Working in concert with Houston Downtown Management District, traffic engineers at Walter P. Moore, and major stakeholder groups, SWA brought a fresh perspective to TxDOT’s desire to improve the highway system, envisioning new ways to realign existing routes and in some cases, to move them underground – freeing up the city surface for cap parks and additional connections to the firm’s ongoing work on local bayou trail systems. SWA proposed consolidating the pathways of I-45 with I-69, an approach which removes existing elevated infrastructure, partially relocates it underground, and replaces it with an at-grade parkway that reconnects adjacent districts along the roadway and bayous. This parkway feeds directly into the grid of the downtown streets.
Being located square in the middle of North America’s “sun belt,” Houston, TX is ripe for adaptive, climate-friendly, and civic-minded interventions in this vein. The Houston Green Loop, an outcome of the firm’s earlier planning work, builds on these ongoing efforts to establish a Downtown “girdled” not by freeways, but by open space systems – serving both commuters and bordering communities who had been previously cut off from vital local connections and vibrant ecology. Proposed amenities along the Green Loop incorporate unique, pedestrian-scale experiences that offer meaningful exchanges among neighborhoods and urban districts. The vision reimagines the “civic commons” with trails, running paths, restoration of a historic bridge, and detention ponds to further the project’s resiliency goals.
Exemplifying the vision that landscape architects can bring to urban environments, the careful repositioning, demolition, and consolidation of Downtown Houston’s major rights-of-way paves the way to a more resilient future for cities worldwide.
John Wayne Airport
SWA served as landscape architects at the new airport terminal located in urban Orange County. Landscape improvements, totaling 20 acres, consisted of a large open area adjacent to the terminal, and narrow planting areas framing the site. The particular challenge was to create an appropriate image and scale for a civic project of enormous scale, including park...
Atlanta Museum of Freeway Art (MOFA)
The freeway is an integral part of the open space of the American City, a series of infrastructural systems that affect the spatial characteristics of our natural and cultural landscapes. The Atlanta Connector Transformation Project is a collaborative effort between the City of Atlanta, Georgia Department of Transportation, Downtown and Midtown to improve the ...
Shunde New City
The Pearl River Delta is the second largest bird migration delta and estuary in Southeast Asia. Preserving and restoring bird and wildlife corridors while also providing regional connectivity, transportation, and development options is at the pinnacle of today’s development challenges. In the Shunde New City Plan, urban development and nature are integra...
Southern Gateway Public Green
The Southern Gateway Public Green will cap Highway 35 in South Dallas directly adjacent to the Dallas Zoo and the Oak Cliff neighborhood. The park’s design effectively reconnects the neighborhood, which was cleaved by the highway’s construction many decades ago.
Recognizing the reunification’s significance, the cap park design introduces the 12th Stree...