The Infra-Space Initiative

From the May 2019 Issue of ARCHITECT:

An underhighway landscape reclaims long-disused space, and offers better water management, for Bostonians.

Throughout the United States, countless acres of urban, suburban, and even rural land are effectively cut off from public use—highway infrastructure, with its diverse ribbons of overpasses and on-ramps, creates marginal zones that could be made accessible to pedestrians but are almost invariably left to languish. But in Massachusetts, a recently unveiled initiative is seeking to reclaim territory that cars have taken away: Under the auspices of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the Infra-Space Initiative program has undertaken a comprehensive study of the disused fringes of the state’s freeway system. To prove the potential of these neglected peripheries, Somerville, Mass.–based architecture practice Landing Studio was engaged to reinvent one such underpass as a new public space, dubbed Infra-Space 1, a viable park environment reconnected to the adjacent urban fabric.

Located in Boston’s South End, the pilot project sits directly under a tangle of concrete of Interstate 93, not far from the segment similarly transformed into parkland by the famous Big Dig. Unlike that grandiose engineering enterprise, which relocated the highway underground, Landing Studio’s design takes the tangle of ramps as a given, carving out a people-friendly space from the car-centric corridor using only the simplest of means, with plantings, paths, and terraces threading through the site. The designers’ opportunistic approach found functionality in almost every square foot, projecting lighting on the underside of the elevated highway, turning storm drainage into a rock-lined creek bed, and preserving (though not enlarging) an existing private parking facility to help fund the improvement. Unseen interventions—in particular an extensive soil remediation process—have helped to yield a manifestly visible result. With its piers looming like vast tree trunks, and the ramps curling into a sort of forest canopy overhead, the Infra-Space 1 is an improbably attractive and even cozy oasis secreted away in the concrete jungle, a perfect model for the program’s future efforts.

Project Credits
Project: Infra-Space Initiative, Boston
Client: Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), National Development (lessee)
Architect: Landing Studio, Boston . Marie Law Adams, AIA, Daniel Adams, Alysoun Wright (project team)
Structural Engineer: BuroHappold Engineering
Electrical Engineer: RS&H
Civil Engineer: Vanasse Hangen Brustlin
Geotechnical Engineer: Geocomp
General Contractor: A.A. Will Corp.
Landscape Architect: Vanasse Hangen Brustlin
Lighting Designer: Landing Studio
Graphic Designer: Visual Dialogue
Size: 8 acres
Cost: $8.5 million

This project won a 2019 AIA Institute Honor Award for Regional & Urban Design

From the AIA:

Mending the rifts in the urban fabric throughout all of Massachusetts, the Infra-Space Initiative addresses the state’s most overlooked spaces: the landscapes beneath elevated highway viaducts. Transforming these inaccessible and foreboding spaces through clever programming, placemaking, and lighting, the initiative is helping to ameliorate the negative impacts of highways on cities with the added environmental benefit of treating significant amounts of stormwater runoff.

The initiative is a study and pilot project for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), which emerged in 2009 from the fusion of two other state agencies with an emphasis on statewide multimodal transportation. While it is required to allocate funds for the construction and maintenance of public roads and transit infrastructure, MassDOT cannot simply build parks. To that end, the initiative cleverly reorganizes and repurposes infrastructure materials to shape a more beneficial public realm. It also proposes an innovative financing model that allows the agency to be reimbursed over time for the initial capital costs for the improvements.

Situated below I-93 in Boston is Infra-Space 1, an 8-acre pilot demonstration that boasts a waterfront promenade along with recreation and event spaces. Historically an industrial zone, the neighborhood was deeply underserved by parks and open space, and the space below the viaduct was afflicted by crime and pedestrian traffic fatalities. Now Infra-Space 1 serves as a model for another eight sites, all of which are in the design concept phase. The pilot’s financial model includes commercial parking to generate revenue, but it did not add any net new parking spots to the area.

By using a careful soil cutting and filling strategy, the team was able to establish a responsible model for dealing with contaminated soil at Infra-Space 1. The resulting undulating landscape allows for stormwater management in the low-lying areas and groves of trees on along the higher hills. The drain leaders that connected the viaduct to subterranean drainage pipes were rerouted into the landscape and filled with plantings hearty enough to withstand high levels of salts and minerals. Other strategies such as stone dissipation basins reduce the velocity of the water cascading down from the highway—often as high as 70 feet above ground—and trap solid waste for proper disposal. The filtration landscape at Infra-Space 1 alone diverts 3.5 million gallons of contaminated water from making its way into the Atlantic Ocean.