Washington Post: Shaping the City | D.C. bridges to be site of mixed-use projects
The goal of bridges is to span across rivers or valleys, streets or highways, rail yards or railroad tracks. Essentially a structurally supported deck, a bridge is a connector enabling movement between whatever the bridge connects. But a few bridges achieve another goal: If the bridging deck supports activities and structures, it is a destination as well as a connector.
With sufficient length and width, a bridge can become in effect built land, a place for residential, commercial and recreational development, a “reconstituted ground plane” in architectural parlance.
PARK(ing) Day has come and gone another year. As always, Elevation DC managing editor Rachel Kaufman CaBiked to as many spots as possible while the parklets were up.
PARK(ing) Day is a decade-old event where groups of people turn a street parking space into a mini park (or “parklet”). Maybe it’s just a bit of grass and a chair, maybe it’s a game of cornhole or a park bench. (One category of “things that go in parks but that we haven’t seen in parklets”: statues. Let’s have a giant statue in a parklet next year, please.)
On Friday, pieces of asphalt around the District were cordoned off and transformed into oases — or at least, that was the idea. These mini parks, called parklets, were set up as part of PARK(ing) Day, the stated mission of which is to “call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat.”
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