Current Work: Capping Highways, Transforming Infrastructure

Current Work is a lecture series featuring leading figures in the worlds of architecture, urbanism, design, and art.

Landscape architects and urban planners present in-progress park projects that span major roadways.

Highway capping, the intervention of building a deck park over a major roadway, can create new parkland in urban areas, stitching together communities that had been split apart—often along racial lines—and mitigating negative environmental impacts of open roadways. Yet the barriers to realizing these large-scale infrastructure projects are many. The program will explore the process behind these projects and evaluate their transformative potential to create more equitable, shared public spaces.

With an introduction to the structural considerations of these bridges and deck parks by engineer Nat Oppenheimer of TYLin, landscape architects Mary Margaret Jones (Hargreaves Jones) and Chuck McDaniel (SWA Group) will present their current highway capping projects across the country. The event will close with a panel discussion and audience Q&A moderated by Juan Camilo Osorio, professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment.

Presented by the Architectural League of New York and the Pratt School of Architecture.

1.5 New York State and AIA CEUs

Registration required. Free to Pratt students, faculty, staff and League members.

Image: SWA Group | Halperin Park (formerly Southern Gateway Public Park) in Dallas, Texas. Image credit: SWA Group