Sarah Peck | IDEAS

What does it take to create a new link within an existing community? For our Houston designers, they have been hard at work for more than the past decade in creating a city-wide green system of Bayous and pedestrian trails for environmental—as well as social—good. And now, the famed Buffalo Bayou is getting another pedestrian bridge. In addition to creating ways to mitigate the wet landscape of this urban area, the park features a series of five bridges that cross the Bayou and connect neighborhoods together. The first pedestrian bridge over Buffalo Bayou was built at the Hobby Convention Center back in 2005 as part of the Buffalo Bayou Promenade. The Rosemont Bridge was built next in 2009 and opened in 2010 to great success.

Today, we spoke with Tim Peterson, Kevin Shanley, Josh Lock, and Scott McCready as they take us behind-the-scenes of the next bridge as it goes up between the Houston Heights and Montrose neighborhoods in Houston.

What’s the name of this next bridge and where is it located?

The Jackson Hill Bridge spans Buffalo Bayou just west of Waugh Drive. Construction is slated to be finished by Fall 2013 and the bridge will be open to the public at that time.

How big is it?

345 Linear feet.

What is it made out of?

Weathering steel truss bridge with pressure treated pine deck.

What is remarkable about the construction process for this bridge?

The bridge is being delivered in six sections and will be bolted together in sections of two and lifted into place. The clear span across the bayou from column to column stretches 150’. Galvanized guardrails are being fabricated along with the galvanized column pylons which will extrude an additional 15’ above the bridge deck and will be internally illuminated. The lighting will shine through a pattern that will be cut into the steel pylon surfaces. The pattern represents the changing appearance of the moon during the lunar cycle. Phase 2 work includes reforestation tree planting that will be installed in the areas where vegetation was cleared to make room for the bridge construction.

Here, they show us how it works — just how, exactly, this new bridge comes to be in its new home:

The Jackson Hill Bridge is located at Waugh and Buffalo Bayou. Before construction started, the site was cleared to accommodate the crane and required machinery.

Fifty foot deep piers are filled with concrete and a matrix of rebar to anchor the structure. The Pedestrian Bridge was designed by SWA Group and RDP Engineers.

A grid of rebar reinforces the Pier Cap.

Concrete was poured into the pier cap. (more…)

One Response to “Behind the Scenes: Designing Jackson Hill Bridge, The Next Pedestrian Bridge for Buffalo Bayou in Houston”

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January 17th, 2014 Reply

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Posted by Sarah Peck
in Landscape Infrastructure, News
on 29 June, 2013

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Designing in the public interest is often challenging–and controversial. How do you know when to do public interest work and when pro-bono efforts are going towards greater good? In our office with the recent launch of our pro-bono Social Impact Design Initiative and partnership with the 1% Program at Public Architecture, we continue to learn from our work… Read more »

Chris Hardy, a designer with our San Francisco office, gave a lecture at ASLA’s Northern California Chapter this Spring to talk about the benefits and challenges of pro-bono work. In the lecture, he mentions six ways that pro-bono work makes us better designers:

New and otherwise unavailable projects help us broaden our experience and train young and intermediate designers in on-the-ground project work;
Each project makes us better designers, particularly (and often) locally;
Younger staff can take ownership over the process in ways that might not be available yet in big office-wide projects within the firm and demonstrate leadership and project management skills;
The project is often an opportunity for mentorship and learning between staff and new contacts within the field;
Strategic volunteering–when a project is pro-bono at first but beneficial to the firm in the long-term–can bring projects that are otherwise unavailable to the firm. For example, when a community has a need for an amenity that’s very strong, but there’s no visioning documents or initial support, a landscape architect can assist with the visual and preliminary documents needed to get a project up and running to later phases;
Inter-office collaboration: with quick charrettes and idea brainstorming, you can meet people within the office and collaborate on a quick project with a tight timeframe and generate new ideas quickly.

Additionally, Chris noted that pro-bono and local projects are “often small enough to get your hands dirty” and they are also discrete–in that you can finish them–so that designers can participate in local design-build projects they can point to fairly quickly. These projects, in turn, serve as a model to help us do more work in the field in the future and act as a catalyst for creating a new market or niche area of expertise within your firm.

As he concludes in his lecture, “pro-bono work is often the beginning of a longer process, and we can learn a lot while doing it and capitalize on our experiences to share and grow.”

“As long as we’re passionate, that’s all that matters.”

Chris Hardy is a designer with SWA’s San Francisco office; he holds an MLA from Cornell University and a B.S. In Conservation Biology from Duke University. He is part of the Social Impact Design Initiative at SWA and spearheads projects focused on ecological design and collaborative community infrastructure.

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Posted by Sarah Peck
in Community, Social Impact
on 12 June, 2013

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Long after the media stops talking about the damage done from hurricanes like Sandy, Ike, and Katrina, in each of our communities, we are left with the task of rebuilding our coastlines and cities to be more resilient to the wipe outs that take years to recover from. Today, after eight years, have we forgotten… Read more »

In a feature-length interview with Jared Green on ASLA’s The DIRT Blog, CEO Kevin Shanley speaks about the future of our coasts and the need for long-term resilience strategies. The news media isn’t a good place to host conversations about our coasts, because the long-term planning and strategies needed for resilience require dedication over decades, not a sensational headline.

“The challenge after Sandy is to ask ourselves what’s the next thing that’s going to distract everybody? In 2001, Houston was hit not with a hurricane but with a really amazing tropical storm called Allison. It dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours. It flooded seventy-five thousand homes and ninety five thousand cars. It was an amazing flood. It actually tracked all the way up to Canada. Post-Allison, many good things started to happen and a number actually did happen. There were bigger policy changes and changes that many of us were working on, but then in September 2001, guess what happened? The national attention, the local attention, everybody’s attention totally changed and a lot of policy-changing momentum was lost.”

“The lesson we need to learn is quite important: we forget really quickly. Katrina happened, now eight years ago. Some structural changes were made to the levee system, but all of the really great plans to re-build New Orleans as a more sustainable community, a better community, a more integrated community came to nothing. In Houston in 2008, Hurricane Ike was a near miss.”

What can we do to improve our cities and our coasts? How can we become more resilient? And are soft infrastructure approaches the best strategy — or are they also problematic?

Check out the entire interview on The Dirt.

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Posted by Sarah Peck
in Bayou By Us, Performance Planning
on 16 May, 2013

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Over the past year, a group of designers from all of our offices have been slowly building up a formal library of all of our various pro-bono projects we’ve been a part of over the years. While doing projects above and beyond our client work is nothing new to SWA—our involvement with the Bayous in Houston and investing in our local schools and parks are just a few of many examples—we’re excited to formalize our efforts and officially join the 1% program with Public Architecture. The 1% program is a national movement in partnership with the AIA that promotes pro bono architectural efforts in the public interest.

Public Architecture_Home Page Screen Shot

“The 1% program of Public Architecture connects nonprofit organizations in need of design assistance with architecture and design firms willing to donate their time on a pro bono basis. Launched by Public Architecture in 2005 with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, The 1% is a first-of-its-kind effort to encourage pro bono service within the architecture and design professions.” – Public Architecture

We believe that as designers, we are called to serve for the public good—to do design that benefits our communities, our environments, our global cities, and our world. At SWA, our social impact design initiative, spearheaded by Principal Cinda Gilliland and includes 36 designers from each of our seven offices.

Our Social Impact Design Initiative was born out of our curiosity and eagerness to find ways to continue to contribute design and planning skills locally and globally. (more…)

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Posted by Sarah Peck
in Community, Social Impact
on 10 April, 2013

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SWA Group has announced the 2012 winners of our Patrick Curran Fellowship program, an internal research award that seeks to further the art and science of landscape architecture. We received 29 applications and selected 10 proposals (two were merged into one) that support our fellowship mission as well as contribute to the firm’s reputation as… Read more »

Posted by Sarah Peck
in Social Impact
on 17 August, 2012

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Landscape Urbanism (dot) com is looking for essays, thoughts, ideas and innovative approaches to landscape urbanism. The team of designers and thinkers at www.landscapeurbanism.com are looking for unique approaches to defining, understanding, communicating and practicing landscape urbanism. Some of the questions we are thinking of answering: Why does landscape urbanism matter? Why do designers do… Read more »

Posted by Sarah Peck
in Landscape Urbanism
on 4 April, 2012

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Posts By: Sarah Peck

Behind the Scenes: Designing Jackson Hill Bridge, The Next Pedestrian Bridge for Buffalo Bayou in Houston

One Response to “Behind the Scenes: Designing Jackson Hill Bridge, The Next Pedestrian Bridge for Buffalo Bayou in Houston”

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Protecting Our Coasts and Cities: Why We Need To Develop Long-Term, Resilient Strategies

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