Reinventing flows of people

Summary

The task for MPA, the team’s architecture and urban design firm, was to transform the structure of the elevated as part of the newly reconceived landscape. They were true collaborators on the groundplane itself, working closely with the landscape architects and also with the artist Michael Singer, whose work on the paving, curbing, and benches integrated public art into the overall design. Our approach was to reinvent the groundplane, which existed as a thin crust of pavement dwarfed by the giant infrastructure, by making it more robust, thicker, a matrix of plants and paving and benches that all felt substantial, rooted in the ground. The landscape needed to stand up to the elevated, to meet it in its force and presence. In this way we could reinvent how people move through the landscape—how the flows of pedestrians, bicyclists, cars, trains, buses, and trucks converge and disperse.