Urban Design/Mixed-Use
Bagby Street
Houston, Texas
Like most downtowns that expanded after the WWII era, downtown Houston became a major office environment that required massive roads to get workers in and out of the city. One of these roads, Bagby Street, was a four-lane thoroughfare that moved cars, lots of them, in one direction. Additionally, Bagby Street was identified as a route for a new regional stormwater system that would help alleviate upstream drainage issues downtown by conveying stormwater through the street to Buffalo Bayou. Working with Midtown District and the City, Bagby Street was repurposed for regional drainage and constructed as a complete street. The new design created open rain gardens along the wider sidewalks, which enable water to be cleansed of 93 percent of the oil and grease from the roadway, improving the water quality downstream. Because of Bagby’s success, the project was awarded the first Greenroads® certification in Texas and it has become the model for other complete streets downtown.
Services Provided: Landscape Architecture, Signage & Wayfinding, Green Infrastructure Design
Awards
- Presidential Award of Excellence for Design & Implementation, ASLA Texas
- Merit Award for Communication, ASLA Texas
- Project of the Year, APWA Texas
- Charter Award, Congress for the New Urbanism
- Active Mobility/Complete Streets Award, International Making Cities Livable
- Excellence Award, Center for Active Design
- Engineering Excellence Honor Award, American Council of Engineering Companies
- Engineering Excellence Gold Award, American Council of Engineering Companies Texas
- Top 10 Elite Roads (#5), Roads & Bridges Magazine
- Greenroads® Silver Certified, Greenroads Foundation
- CSI Case Study, Landscape Performance Series, Landscape Architecture Foundation
Client
Houston Midtown Redevelopment Authority
Collaborators
Walter P. Moore