11th Street Bridge Park is a winning proposal by OMA for Building Bridges Across the River and District Department of Transportation designed in 2014. It is located in Washington DC United States in a riverside setting. Its scale is large with a surface of 11.120 sqm. Key materials are concrete and vegetal. Luxigon collaborated as visualizer. Concepts such as connection cantilever renaturalization and viewpoint are explored.

The 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C., confronted us with a set of entrenched divisions that dominate many cities—disparities of income and investment that all too often align with race and are reinforced by geography. D.C. was planned around the confluence of two rivers, the Potomac and the Anacostia. While the more recognized Potomac defines its organic southwestern edge with Virginia, the Anacostia cuts through the city, dividing its southeastern quadrant from the rest. The west side of the Anacostia River is defined by Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s classical plan, crisscrossed with diagonal avenues whose intersections—called Reservations—mark the locations of civic buildings and public spaces. The east side is less formally organized, with a terrain of hills that fragment its street grid and a riverfront that is bucolic in comparison to the industrialized western bank. The west is dominated by D.C.’s practical and symbolic role as the nation’s capital, while the largely African-American east side is home to more native D.C. residents than any other neighborhood. Today, the west is high income while the east has the lowest income levels in the district. Over the last fifteen years, the post-industrial Capitol Riverfront along the west bank has become a thriving mixed-use area, while the east side has long been excluded from the city’s economic progress. The idea behind the 11th Street Bridge Park was to utilize abandoned infrastructure—a set of piers from a now-defunct vehicular bridge—to create a pedestrian link between east and west. As its name implies, the park would be at once a thoroughfare across the river and a gathering place over it. This improbable proposal led to a design competition we entered together with landscape architects OLIN in the spring of 2014.

Our approach was not to create a singular and symbolic connector, but rather a multilayered place formed by the literal extension of two paths over the river. The two trajectories extend through and past each other, creating a gathering space where they intersect. The resulting form—an X—is an iconic encounter, an intersection that, like L’Enfant’s Reservations, marks a shared civic space in the city. The X shape provides a number of practical benefits. Its upper decks lift visitors high above the river, providing a vantage point from which they can orient themselves and look out to both the monuments of D.C. and the hills of Anacostia. Where the upper and lower decks overlap, the gaps between them provide depth for the bridge’s structure. The decks also provide covered zones that, together with OLIN’s carefully orchestrated landscape, offer a continuous shaded path—a relief from D.C.’s famously swampy summers. The most straightforward way to ensure that the investment in the Bridge Park would benefit the east side of the river was to simply make the bridge wider on that side, allowing for a concentration of programs and space. An Environmental Education Center, cafe, and playspace are located on this wider east side, with a performance space and a hammock grove on the west. The layering of the bridge also allows us to temper the potential for it to be—like some contemporary parks—too fixed with specific programs.

While we can provide dedicated spaces for attractors like the cafe on the lower decks, above them we can allocate spaces for more casual and open-ended areas, such as a walkway and a lawn. Almost immediately after the competition, we began to see our renderings used by real estate agents in Anacostia. What we saw as an unquestioned benefit could clearly have more sinister, unforeseen impacts. Having won the competition in 2014, we finally entered the final phases of design in 2021. That seven-year lag has provided space for our client (Building Bridges Across the River led by Scott Kratz), to conceive and fund an equitable development plan. The goal of the plan is to ensure that the park will be a driver of inclusive development. From educating residents about tenants’ rights and facilitating homeownership to investing in Black artists and businesses, these efforts have helped extend the project of the Bridge Park far beyond its physical limits—even before it exists.

0745-OMA-WSG.US-2014 — Posted in 2025 — Explore more projects on bridge and public space — Climate: temperate and humid subtropical — Coordinates: 38.872077, -76.989812 — Team: Jason Long, Yusef Ali Dennis, Titouan Chapouly, Darby Foreman, Gonzalo Samaniego, Alireza Shojakhani, Yiyao Wang, Chris Battaglia, Jeremy Kim, Ruth Mellor, Sunggi Park, Alexandre Pavlidis, Slava Savova, Ahmadreza Schricker, Shohei Shigematsu, Lawrence Siu, Alex Yuen — Consultant: ARCH Development, Setty & Associates, Threshold Acoustics, WDP & Associates, Dharam Consulting, MCLA, Cecilia Alemani — Engineer: Delon Hampton — Structural engineer: WRA, Arup, Delon Hampton — Landscape: OLIN — Views: 191