The Urban Future Lab and founder Dr. Antonio Petrov are delighted to have received the “Most Innovative Civic Space Design Firm in Texas” and “the Best Public Infrastructure Project in the Southwest United States” by the European BUILD Magazine for “1000 Parks and a Line in the Sky.” This project exemplifies how we see the future as value- and dialogue-based, progressive, sometimes provocative, but ultimately devoted to expanding the field of vision for a new spatial contract in harmony with culture, society, and the built environment. Our ambition is to shape civic spaces that contemplate transportation, infrastructure, and urban design, culminating in what we refer to as “creative public-interest engineering.” On the one hand, this is about the human environment and being a critical voice for contemporary realities at every scale, which includes enabling social imagination, active participation, and citizen agency. While on the other, we are actively engaged in shaping the physical and political environments by engineering infrastructural and multi-modal transportation systems. The project came to life through the discovery of 1,000 unused and underutilized interstitial spaces that, if combined in a system, could revitalize a centerless, fragmented Broadway, transformed into a publicly designed park that hybridizes green space, transportation, and infrastructure. We propose an 8.6-mile-long system of micro and macro parks that meander below a “Skyride” connecting the San Antonio Airport to Travis Park. While the parks draw residents on a local level, the Skyride operates on an urban scale, connecting San Antonio’s major cultural destinations, like the proposed Aquarium, the Alamo, Downtown, Riverwalk, Hemisfair Park, Convention Center, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, San Antonio Museum of Art, Brackenridge Golf Course, DoSeum, Brackenridge Park, Pearl area, Zoo, Witte Museum, and Sunken Gardens into a single linear system of parks. Whether walking, riding a bike, or experiencing the city from new vantage points in the sky, the design vision exemplifies new urban ecologies and their capacity for immediate economic impact, actualizing Broadway’s inherent potential as San Antonio’s Avenue of the future. This also led to the formation of alliances and potential public-private partnerships as well as a new funding model and a streamlined minimally invasive construction process to limit disruptions on the community, local businesses, and the environment.
Project team
Jessica Gameros
Jose Antonio Herrera
Mariano Garcia
Michelle Montiel
Aaron Stone
Read More
BUILD Magazine’s Construction & Engineering Awards 2019: Official Press Release
Texas Architect: 1,000 Parks and a Line in the Sky
1000 Parks and a Line in the Sky: Broadway, Avenue of the Future
“1000 Parks and a Line in the Sky: Broadway, Avenue of the Future” exhibited at ITC
“1000 Parks and a Line in the Sky: Broadway, Avenue of the Future” exhibited at Brick in Blue Star
“1000 Parks and a Line in the Sky: Broadway, Avenue of the Future” exhibited at Build Your Own Broadway
A third condition between urban and non-urban—a Broadway linear park
Dr. Antonio Petrov, students exhibit architectural interventions for Alamo Heights & Broadway
Alamo Heights Broadway Corridor Research
Texas Public Radio’s The Source: New Vision of Broadway
Texas Public Radio’s The Source: Should Alamo Heights Build A Broadway Linear Park?
