from Architectural Digest
Houston’s Memorial Park just celebrated the opening of a massive infrastructure project. The space, which is the largest wilderness park in Houston, has been open to the public since 1924. But in the 1940s and ’50s, as the prominence of the automobile increased and the city expanded beyond its traditional core, the park was seen as a logical place to locate a six-lane parkway, connecting the Downtown district with the emerging Uptown district to the west. Like many infrastructure projects of that era, this roadway, Memorial Drive, scythed a broad paved path through vibrant public space, bisecting the park into two distinct and disparate sections, one above the road and one below. Now, highly respected landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, working in conjunction with a public/private partnership in the city, has unveiled an audacious solution to remedy these issues, one that could be seen as a fresh model for other cities to follow.