Pondering large with a brand new downtown park

The Arkansas Division of Transportation’s 30 Crossing undertaking, the interminable, colossally costly overhaul of the Interstate 30 bridge, is nearly totally dangerous information. Its 500 lanes of site visitors (solely a slight exaggeration) will create an unpleasant concrete sea in the course of downtown Little Rock, and sure have little impact on rush hour site visitors congestion.

If there’s any excellent news to be discovered within the undertaking, it’s that Little Rock will get a brand new, outstanding 20-acre park downtown. 30 Crossing has gotten rid of the on- and off-ramps within the River Market District, which frees up a spatula-shaped parcel of land that stretches below the interstate for park use. Whereas the Division of Transportation will proceed to personal the land, it’s Little Rock’s to construct out as a park. What that may appear like is after all depending on cash, and regardless of new allocations for Little Rock parks from federal coronavirus aid funds and forthcoming cash generated from the proceeds of the capital millage voters just lately renewed, there’s not prone to be sufficient to do something spectacular anytime quickly.

That’s no motive we shouldn’t nonetheless contemplate visionary choices, one thing the design nonprofit studioMAIN has inspired Little Rock to do because it was based a decade in the past. Earlier this 12 months, studioMAIN hosted the Envision Competitors 2022, looking for plans for the parkland from professionals, college students and members of the general public. Juried and public alternative awards got. See all of the submissions at studio-main.org.

ARKANSAS RIVER WALK

ARKANSAS RIVER WALK

AMR Architects received the Wildcard Public Alternative Award for its daring plan to carry the Arkansas River into downtown through a sequence of canals lined by inexperienced house and mixed-use improvement.

ÜNDRAPASS

ÜNDRPASS

Kudos to Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects, winner of the Public Alternative Little Rock Placemaking Award, for developing with a really cool trying quilt-like set up that undulates below and across the interstate and othewise incorporating a great deal of inexperienced house in its design. However Little Rock has a “no umlauts” rule in park names. 

LITTLE ROCK PARKWAY

Cromwell Architects Engineers received the Public Alternative Award for Set up Connections for its plan, which preserves the spiral framework of the outdated on- and off-ramps. The design has all of the issues a park ought to: a pavilion, an amphitheater, a splash pad, a playground, sports activities fields and courts, an enormous pond, a meals truck space and many inexperienced house. 

TOWN BRANCH PARK

TOWN BRANCH PARK

Taggart Architects received the Jury Award within the Skilled class for its trendy imaginative and prescient that calls again the previous. City Department was what the world was as soon as often called, and Taggart envisions “reviving” a creek between Second and Third streets and developing a “treehouse metropolis” that’s imagined to recall historic metropolis cloth of yore. There’s additionally an enormous blue dino sculpture, Little Rock-y, that doubles as a climbing wall.

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