The Steel Yard - Overlooking Yard

Built: 2011

Most cities with industrial pasts inherit problematic environmental futures. The Steel Yard's cleanup of a former brownfield site is a showcase for regenerative design in a tough environment. Within industrial Providence, the project is a public intervention that upends commonly held notions of blighted neighborhoods and shows the potential for real, actively engagedâ€"not simply 'adaptive'â€"re-use. The Steel Yard's landscape features innovative (and necessarily inexpensive) brownfield remediation, stormwater filtration/reduction, purposeful design and placemaking. Competing interests of large paved surfaces for outdoor work space, events, and vehicular movement, balanced with the sustainable interests of reducing impervious pavement, are driving forces of the landscape design. The resulting design is centered on a paved plane, 'the carpet,' which is woven with heavy- and light-duty pavements, impermeable and pervious materials.