Fayetteville Street has served as the cultural and economic spine of downtown Raleigh since the city’s founding plan in 1792, connecting landmarks including the North Carolina State Capitol and the Performing Arts Center. Following its conversion from a neglected pedestrian mall in the 1970s to a ceremonial street in the 2000s, the area in and around Fayetteville Street attracted more than $2 billion in public and private investment. The current streetscape redesign builds that momentum across five central blocks, addressing the corridor’s declining vitality and reinforcing its potential as a gathering place for intimate community gatherings and large-scale civic events. SWA collaborated with the City of Raleigh Urban Projects Group and engaged Engineering Services, Parks and Recreation, Urban Forestry, Transportation, the City Manager’s Office, and the Downtown Raleigh Alliance.
The design strategy centers on opening the street, inviting greater activation through modifying existing horizontal planters to free space for outdoor seating, introducing new site furnishings and wayfinding elements, and commissioning public art installations to create cultural sights along the corridor. For the redesign of City Plaza, concentric circles in the paving design organize site elements to frame daily use and community events. Together, these interventions preserve the street’s ceremonial scale while returning to the site’s history, prioritizing a people-centered public realm.
Grand Candela Memorial
The “Grand Candela” commemorates the victims and survivors of the August 2019 mass shooting tragedy at Walmart’s Cielo Vista store. Inspired by the motif of an everlasting candle and set in a plaza within the store’s parking lot, the memorial offers a dedicated place of healing and remembrance. Twenty-two columns of perforated metal, one for each life lost, ar...
Uptown ATX Master Plan
Previously a single-use, auto-centric office complex, Uptown ATX is a 66-acre transformation resulting in a transit-oriented, mixed-use neighborhood that further bolsters the burgeoning technology hub of Northwest Austin. Situated between the Charles Schwab campus and The Domain, the Uptown ATX master plan features 3.2 million square feet of workspace, 2.9 mil...
Chelsea Waterside Park
In 1986, Thomas Balsley Associates was asked by the Chelsea Waterside Park Association to translate this community’s vision for a waterfront park into a design document that would be used to plan the new Route 9-A and the proposed Hudson River Park. Ten years later, when funding for the Chelsea Waterside Park was identified, Thomas Balsley Associates won an in...
Jinbocho Redevelopment
Situated in central Tokyo’s university and publishing district, this new mixed-use project brought urban streetscape character to its immediate neighborhood through the introduction of plazas whose fountains, seating areas, cafes and sculptures serve residents, workers, and the community as a refuge from the busy streets.
A diagram of pedestrian flows t...