Spanning three city blocks and linking two vibrant city attractions, the Grounds Connector is an integral but unfinished component of Eero Saarinen’s vision for the St. Louis Arch. This missing link can be partially blamed for the disconnect between a stressed downtown and a popular monument that draws four million visitors per year.
Following an international outreach, Thomas Balsley Associates was commissioned to complete Saarinen’s 20th century modernist vision with a 21st century landscape and urban design approach. Extensive historical, urban design and site specific research informed a series of conceptual design studies, each revealing dramatic new ways to introduce Arch visitors to downtown St. Louis. All included covering the sunken interstate highway and the “pedestrianization” of the flanking Memorial Boulevard.
The passage and pauses have been carefully conceived as celebrations of the diversity of contemporary urban life and include landscape narratives on the Jefferson Expansion and Lewis and Clark Expedition. Great lawns for celebrations, daily civic gatherings, cafes, interpretive kiosks, interactive fountains, distinctive paving and native plantings have been composed into a distinctive and memorable landscape worthy of its designer and the rich contemporary heritage of the Arch.
Curtis Hixon Park
Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park has been heralded as Tampa’s missing “here” and the crown jewel in the city’s Riverwalk, a bold new urban plan conceived to reactivate the Hillsboro River and downtown Tampa. To ensure that the park takes its place as focal point of this new cultural district, a master plan was prepared from which the park, Riverwalk, and museums a...
Nelson Mandela Park Master Plan
Identified by the City as one of its “Big Five” open space projects, the conceptual master plan for Nelson Mandela Park will create a much-needed central open space for the city’s south district, an industrial area along the waterfront that is home to a growing and increasingly diverse population. Here the city seeks to transcend its current park paradigm of l...
Naftzger Park
Naftzger Park offers a contemporary and communal gathering space in downtown Wichita with enough variety to appeal to everyone. Designed to activate an area of town between Old Town and a burgeoning new entertainment district, the park is at once an urban foye...
Aitken Place Park
Aitken Place Park will be at the heart of Toronto’s East Bayfront Community – currently being transformed from an underutilized industrial brownfield into a vibrant waterfront neighborhood. Flanked by the residential development to the west and the commercial buildings to the north, the park’s water’s edge location presents a unique opportunity to create...