Located in West Houston, the Alief Neighborhood Center and Park serves one of the city’s most diverse communities. Over 90 languages are spoken in Alief, which is home to first-generation immigrants from across the world and refugees from as far away as Vietnam and close as Louisiana—especially in the wake up Hurricane Katrina, when many families made a permanent home in Houston.
Reopened to the public in January 2023, the project models a paradigm shift in community services, combining four City departments (Health, Parks, Libraries, and General Services) under one roof—a civic center at the heart of an entirely redeveloped 38-acre urban sports park. The center also features the “biggest front porch in West Texas,” a large, covered porch that serves as a flexible gathering space.
Raised out of the floodplain, the Alief Neighborhood Center and Park also model resilient landscape design after Hurricane Harvey, weaving hardy native planting through a necklace of forested basins that naturally drain the site. Since its reopening, the project has become particularly popular with families, local seniors, and the skating community, who helped design skate park features through multiple workshops with the design team.
Grand Candela Memorial
The “Grand Candela” commemorates the victims and survivors of the August 2019 mass shooting tragedy at Walmart’s Cielo Vista store. Inspired by the motif of an everlasting candle and set in a plaza within the store’s parking lot, the memorial offers a dedicated place of healing and remembrance. Columns of perforated metal, one for each life lost, are joined to...
Lin'an High Tech Park
Lin’an Qingshan Lake Forest Technology Park offers a premier destination for high-tech and green-tech businesses. Designed in harmony with nature, this mixed-use community will foster productivity and connections to its physical and cultural setting, providing a vibrant mix of uses and a business culture appealing to a wide range of international enterprises. ...
Thousand Lantern Lake Park System
Nanhai Citizen’s Plaza and Thousand Lantern Lake Park exemplifies the exciting and innovative opportunities for master planning and urban design in new international communities. The site is located in the newly established city of Nanhai, and consists of a commercial precinct, public parks, and civic buildings arranged around a series of lakes and waterways. ...
Southern Gateway Public Green
The Southern Gateway Public Green will cap Highway 35 in South Dallas directly adjacent to the Dallas Zoo and the Oak Cliff neighborhood. The park’s design effectively reconnects the neighborhood, which was cleaved by the highway’s construction many decades ago.
Recognizing the reunification’s significance, the cap park design introduces the 12th Stree...