:quality(80)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/lanacionar/V526B32CMNCLDLA5MI3UNCHRGM.webp?fit=%2C&ssl=1 "Is it the future of highways? The new green project looks like the High Line in New York and will revolutionize cities")
In the United States, they inaugurated an infrastructure project that exemplifies one of the trends of the new era of mobility. Its about Kinder Land Bridgea restructuring of Memorial Drive, a six-lane avenue that crosses the largest natural park in the city of Houston, Texas, and connects the Downtown district with the emerging Uptown district.
The construction project has a long history. The space -Houston’s Memorial Park- is one of the most popular parks in the metropolis, and has been open to the public since 1924. However, starting in the 1940s, the fever of having a car among American citizens reached a peak, and the number of motorized vehicles circulating grew exponentially, also generating an expansion of the city beyond its traditional core. It was because of this that the large park became home to a large paved avenue, also a large CO2 emitter.
It was also as a result of the construction of Memorial Drive that it was decided to divide the park into sections, prioritizing asphalt over green, a look applied in many infrastructure projects of that time.
This old look, however, is in dissonance with the values that predominate current ideals. It is a little for this reason that the initiative of Nelson Byrd Woltz, a landscape architecture firm, which proposed a reform to solve – and at some point vindicate – the role of Memorial Drive in the city of Houston.
“Our idea was to make a massive earthwork to cross the six lanes of the avenue“, he pointed Thomas Woltz, company owner, in an interview with Architectural Digest, a website specializing in design and architecture. “So we designed four high-performance concrete tunnels: parabolic arches, geometrically strong structures, and then raised the soil to encase them.”
The result, explains the manager, is something similar to New York’s High Line, where in a similar way, a dilapidated infrastructure was transformed into a new and attractive public space.
baptized as Kinder Land Bridge, the new space elevated almost 12 meters high exhibits a lot of potential. “Houston is a flat city, and this height allows for new views. People will be able to gather there to watch the sunrise and sunset,” says Woltz. “With this work we not only want to connect people with each other, but also connect them with the feeling that we all share the same planet”.
One of the main objectives of the American landscape firm is to repatriate the activity of wildlife in the area. For this, exhaustive research was carried out to understand the dynamics of the ecosystem, with its changes and alterations throughout the millennium, since the virgin land was first inhabited by indigenous peoples, then by European settlers, private owners and urban planners.
“By going back to the origins of ecological history we can find more effective and resilient solutions. Our proposal is a hybrid, that becomes a high-yield landscape and even represents the native Texas ecosystem,” Woltz notes.
The equation is simple: the more space free of cars and full of vegetation there is, the more animals there will be. “In my opinion, it is the triumph of green over grey.” concludes.
The realization of the new landscaped bridge could be a source of inspiration and trigger so that other cities in the United States -and why not in Latin America- begin to implement more infrastructure solutions that aim to revitalize nature, instead of cementing it.
The Kinder Land Bridge is just one of the projects that Woltz’s firm has on the agenda for the city of Houston. “In the near future we want to open miles of trails for walking, running, and even horseback riding.. We also want to do boardwalks and a real memorial to WWI soldiers. We have many ideas for the future”, reveals the man.
