A key component in the downtown revitalization strategy, Main Street Garden Park required razing two city blocks of buildings and garages to make way for its transformation into a vibrant public space teeming with civic life. This two-acre park fosters downtown residential and commercial growth and was designed to accommodate the needs of residents in adjacent high-rise residential buildings, university students and faculty, office workers, and Main Street shoppers. Extensive public outreach and a carefully designed program for this diverse constituency has ensured the park’s success and sustained public embrace. The design acknowledges adjacent architecturally significant buildings such as the Beaux Arts City Hall and Mercantile Bank Building yet strikes a dramatic 21st-century design profile at this key location in Dallas’s emerging new urban core. The park includes an open lawn and performance space, around which key park elements are arrayed, seating areas, tot lot, central plaza, a unique “urban stream” with marble seat slabs, a “striated” garden, an urban dog run, illuminated green glass study-room shelters, and lush plantings. A green roof civic canopy hovers over the park pavilion and its raised cafe terrace. An artful light installation animates the garden room shelters and enhances the Main Street edge throughout the evening. This variety of spaces, ranging from large open lawn and café terraces to fountain plazas and garden rooms, will host neighborhood and civic events that, together with daily use, bring life and vitality to downtown Dallas.
Ricardo Lara Park
Ricardo Lara Park is a vibrant city park and a case study in landscape infrastructure. It demonstrates how a small investment and creative thinking about landscape can transform the very infrastructure that has long divided and isolated a community into an amenity that unites it, offering much-needed environmental and recreational benefits.
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Freedom Park Master Plan
In the late 20th century, Atlanta faced a critical juncture as a proposed highway threatened to tear through seven urban communities. From this crisis emerged a powerful grassroots movement whose victory not only halted the highway but birthed Freedom Park, a 130-acre green space stretching over 2.5 miles.
For years, Freedom Park existed as a patchwork ...
Terry Hershey Park
The park design includes a one-mile hike and bike trail system, a pedestrian underpass linking the park to an existing trail system, bridges over the creek, and automobile parking. Gabions were used as an environmentally friendly means of slope retention in a floodway and as a tool for creating places for people to enjoy the wooded environment. Sinuous banks a...
San Jacinto Plaza
SWA’s redesign of San Jacinto Plaza, a historic gathering place in El Paso’s downtown business district provides a state-of-the-art urban open space, while protecting and celebrating the history and culture of the site. The project was the result of an intensive community process involving input from a wide range of constituents. Active programming, environmen...