The 11th Street Bridge Park, which will be constructed along the pillars of an old road bridge crossing Washington, DC’s Anacostia River, has been a long time coming. The Washington Post reports that after more than 200 community and public meetings and a seven-month-long design competition in which 82 international architecture firms competed, a proposal has finally been selected.

Dubbed “Anacostia Crossing,” it comes from OMA + OLIN, a collaboration between Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), with offices in New York and the Netherlands, and Philadelphia-based Olin Studio. The winning design will form a sloping X shape, and includes a central plaza, cafes, an environmental center, boat launches, an amphitheater, an interactive art feature, a grove of hammocks, and a series of nets that would allow people to dangle out over the river.

Rendering of 11th Street Bridge Park.
Courtesy OMA + OLIN.

The park will cost approximately $40 million to construct. The project has thus far been backed by the DC government along with private donors. With the selection of the final design, a capital campaign has been launched to raise the remainder of the funds.

The project’s goals are to bolster economic development, improve public health, connect communities on either side of the river, and change widespread perceptions of the river as a polluted wasteland. It will also hopefully become a destination for people throughout the city and its surrounding suburbs. Like New York’s High Line park (see “Adrián Villar Rojas Goes Wild on the High Line“), it will be a mixed-use public gathering space for education, commerce, and art. Unfortunately, there’s been no word yet on the timeline for construction.

View of High Line, New York City.
Photo: Xauxa Håkan Svensson, via Wikimedia Commons.