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.
“Our idea in the comprehensive plan was to create a massive earthwork that would cross the six lanes of highway,” Thomas Woltz, owner of the firm, tells AD. “So we designed four high performance concrete tunnels that are parabolic arches—extremely strong geometries—and then brought the soil up to cover them.” The result is. like the High Line in New York, a new landmark for the city that converts blighting infrastructure into a fresh and compelling public space, the Kinder Land Bridge. “[The size,] 38 feet, is a mountain in Houston because it’s a very flat city. So there are new views from up there, and it’s really amazing,” Woltz says in reference to the new vertical limits of the built environment. “I think people will gather there to watch the sun rise and, later in the day, watch it set. In that way, you’re connecting people to each other but you’re also connecting them to the something greater, reminding them that we all share this planet.”