Current Work: Capping Highways, Transforming Infrastructure

Current Work is a lecture series featuring leading figures in the worlds of architecture, urbanism, design, and art.

Current Architectural League members receive a free ticket to this and other events throughout the year. To access your fully discounted member ticket or tickets, click "Enter promo code" in the ticket window and enter your Member Number.

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All confirmed attendees may claim Continuing Education Units for this event.

This event will not be livestreamed.

Highway capping, the intervention of building a deck bridge over a major roadway, can create new parkland in urban areas, stitching together formerly separated neighborhoods and mitigating negative environmental impacts of open roadways. Recent federal efforts such as the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Grant Program within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act highlight the reparative power of highway caps in cities scarred, often along racial lines, by mid-century urban renewal.

Yet the barriers to realizing these large-scale infrastructure projects are many: from the challenges of transportation planning for major thoroughfares, to sustaining public and private support over extended timelines, to the complex design decisions about both the structure of the deck itself and of community placemaking in this reclaimed urban landscape. The program will explore the process of realizing these large-scale infrastructural projects and evaluating the transformative potential of highway caps to create a more equitable, shared public realm.

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Banner Image: SWA Group | Halperin Park (formerly Southern Gateway Public Park) in Dallas, Texas. Image credit: SWA Group

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