Four teams competing to design an 11th Street Bridge park over the Anacostia have released stunning images of their designs.

Image from Balmori Associates + Cooper, Robinson & Partners.

The 11th Street Bridge Park idea arose during the construction for new bridges. The old bridge was taken down, but pylons in the river remained. What about making it into a park? Scott Kratz, then vice-president for education at the National Building Museum, carried this idea forward, built support, and raised money for this design competition.

The finalist teams OMA / OLIN, Balmori Associates / Cooper Robertson & Partners, Stoss Landscape Urbanism / Höweler + Yoon Architecture, and Wallace Roberts Todd / NEXT Architects all designed a combination of active recreation and passive landscaped areas stretching alongside the local bridge from one bank of the Anacostia to the other.

Making a park work here won’t be easy. This isn’t an area where people are walking on foot already, and it’s not that close to many residents or jobs. That means it will have to be a destination people explicitly travel to.

There will need to be a good way to get there, too. There’s no Metro station right near either end (Navy Yard is not so far but not so close), and the streetcar planned to cross the river, which could stop along the route, faces an uncertain funding picture. (Tiny ferries, maybe?)

This piece of the above image illustrates the challenge very starkly:

This is the east side of the bridge. The closest buildings are in the lower right. The bridge starts in the upper left. In between is the ultimate pride and joy of a generation of DDOT engineers.

However, the Anacostia absolutely should become a destination. There are now some attractions along its banks that didn’t exist recently. More will come. And over time, the river itself can evolve into a place instead of a barrier. This bridge park could be a big piece of that.

Image from OLIN + OMA.

OLIN + OMA envision a series of trapezoidal spaces with elevated or angled roofs creating vertical variation. Each piece would serve a different purpose, including a playground, interactive art, amphitheater, plaza, urban agriculture, picnic garden, and so forth.

Image from OLIN + OMA.

This design shows the park brimming with activity. One question is, would it also work at times when the park isn’t busy, or would the many drops and rises make it feel dangerous when quiet?

Balmori + Cooper Robinson’s design has fewer, more open spaces with a curvilinear feel. There is a lot of greenery with canopies for shade. A large, wavy spine rises above the park, evoking the symbolism of a bridge and the idea of connecting both sides of the river in a “thread” (linking is a major theme in most designs, not surprisingly).

Image from Balmori Associates + Cooper, Robinson & Partners.

An “aperture” through the surface lets people look down into the water below.

Image from Balmori Associates + Cooper, Robinson & Partners.

This feels like a very calming space that evokes nature. Is that ideal, or is that redundant next to the very large Anacostia Park along the east bank? It also seems to connect the bridge more closely to the west side of the river, which is at once logical (because there isn’t the same massive freeway barrier on the west side, but there is a big park already) but also less connecting.

Image from Balmori Associates + Cooper, Robinson & Partners.

The team of Stoss and Höweler + Yoon Architecture use a boat motif to link up a series of angular modules that can variously become a plaza, farmers’ market, art exhibition, street theater, and more, flanked by two buildings that can serve as a cafe and education center (two elements the design competition asked all teams to include).

Image from Stoss / Höweler + Yoon Architecture.

Flexibility could be useful for the bridge park to add amenities as the surrounding areas grow and when, in the future, residents from more-distant neighborhoods or even tourists might regularly be coming to the banks of the Anacostia on a nice day.

This design puts less on the bridge itself and more activity over the east bank of the Anacostia, between the riverbank and the freeway.

Image from Stoss / Höweler + Yoon Architecture.

Besides the two buildings, most of the bridge is, like New York’s High Line, linear space that feels like somewhere to walk. This can work if a lot of people want to actually come and walk here (the High Line is in the middle of a massively dense area).

Image from Stoss / Höweler + Yoon Architecture.

The design from Wallace Roberts Todd + NEXT Architects unifies the bridge with a large wire-frame canopy that can integrate with each of the activities along the bridge, like a decorative roof for an amphitheater and a climbing structure in a playground.

Images from WRT + NEXT.

This design also puts a lot of activity on the bridge through a series of sections. It seems to have the most focus on physical activity and play, and seem most similar to the initial rough concepts the park team put out before the competition.

What elements do you think would work best or not work so well from these designs? You can access the large PDFs here.

You can see the design boards in person at THEARC Gallery, 1901 Mississippi Ave. SE, from September 14 to October 11, at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum (1901 Fort Place SE) and the District Architecture Center downtown (421 7th Street NW) from September 24 to October 11. The teams will present to a jury and answer questions on September 29 and 30 at THEARC, which the public can also watch.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.