DETAILS
With its grand landscape views, Guangming Trail is both a green, healthy “slow circulation” system in an urban area, and an exemplar of innovation and sustainability. The trail’s topography changes as it progresses through mountains, valleys, hills, and farms. By considering vegetation, habitats, hydrology, and topography, sites with high value and potential were selected to be major design nodes, but the trail’s three bridges are among its most striking features.
The simple, geometric Floating Bridge is a high-tech path for walking and biking that traces and provides shaded overlooks of the water. Discovery Bridge’s undulating boardwalk traces site ecology and creates dynamic, intriguing spaces for pedestrians. Hanging Bridge evokes the wind that animates the site, connecting human experience with the outdoors.
Houston Green Loop
With the coming expansion and realignment of the highways around Downtown Houston, SWA identified the opportunity to enact a bold vision: a multi-use branded connectivity system that will leverage the immense reconstruction investment. SWA’s concept creates a continuous pedestrian loop over, under, and around the downtown highway system, thus redirecting the u...
Buffalo Bayou Smith to Travis Streets Trail Segment
This effort in Downtown Houston extends the Buffalo Bayou trail system eastward with the Smith to Travis Trail, connecting two historically significant sites: Sesquicentennial Park and Allen’s Landing, where the city was founded. It is a technically challenging segment located twenty feet below street level that traverses under multiple roadway bridges crossin...
Guiyang Hot Springs
Guiyang Hot Springs, located in Guiyang City, China, brings together the rhythm of the Nanming River, and surrounding trails and trees to create a new urban ‘living room’ in the interstitial space created by new development and roadway infrastructure. Nestled into a mountainous site, the master planning addressed elevation changes of up to 100 meters and the e...
Katy Trail
Katy Trail represents a remarkable resource for the residents of the Dallas Fort Worth region. Conceived in 1870, the M. K. and T. Railway united the North and South via railroad. Today, a portion of this now abandoned linkage serves as a unifying element for the many users living nearby. The project provides approximately 3.5 miles of intercity bicycle and pe...