Reinvesting the Highway
Some Proposals from Kansas City
by Philippe Barriere
(CUDC Quarterly 4:2 - Summer 2005)
In the most recent issue of Review, a gorgeous annual journal of urban planning and architecture out of Kansas City, Philippe Barriere discusses a number of visionary proposals for new kinds of highway infrastructure.
The premise of the article is that, since freeways aren’t going to go away, we have every reason to demand more of them, not just aesthetically but programmatically. The designs Barriere has assembled show the various urban and suburban freeways around Kansas City as sites of programmatic intensity. They concentrate auto-oriented uses, as all freeways inevitably do, but they also introduce urbanity in novel ways. These visions are not decoration or enhancement; they advocate for transformed expectations and higher performance from the next generation of civil engineering. Here are two of the projects, with descriptions from Barriere’s article.
Urban_Highway on I-670 (UH-1)
by Courtney Miller, Brandon Schulz and Dan Bradbury (click to enlarge)
Urban_Highway, splitting downtown Kansas City, displays urbanity as the city storefront facing the highway becomes an urban window, allow Kansas City to exhibit an urban identity and uniqueness. Such window displays visually connect citizens engaging in automobility with those consuming, eating, drinking or night-clubing. (Paris’ Champs Elysee is essentially an urban highway, yet epitomizes urbane sophistication par excellence.) Presently, there is little incentive to enter Kansas City because from the interstate it seems that there is nothing worth seeing.
Programmatically, this consideration of the highway serves downtown by providing automobile and high capacity bus access for a bus authority terminal, parking and major retail amenities currently absent in the area. While preserving lanes of through traffic, the highway serves as an alley for these structures, providing simplified access for customers and closer connection to distribution networks. Further, the frontage roads are restructured to include parking ramps that connect the city to the highway and liberate adjacent blocks for future development and greenspace.
Trans_connector
design by Trevor Ablot, Paul Brinker, Chris Glass, Emilie Hagen, Andrew Senderak, rendering by Philippe Barriere (click to enlarge)
Connects the I-70 Bridge with Highway 40 as a linear, multi-layered station representing the eastern entrance gate to Kansas City. The connection of Interstate 70 with Highway 40, a bridge over a train yard, becomes a hyper-dense urban moment along a highway that pulls all the elements of a community into a synergetic complex. Contained within it are everything from drive-thru amenities, to shopping, theaters, housing and parks (on the rooftop). It is designed to be a place where disjointed localities come together as a community.
