Trahan Architects and Spackman Mossop Michaels will overhaul a major Arkansas park – The Architect’s Newspaper

Springdale, Arkansas, will be the latest city to get a major parks reimagining, as the New Orleans and New York-based Trahan Architects and New Orleanss Spackman Mossop Michaels have revealed a total overhaul of Luther George Park.

The project continues the Walton Familys reshaping of Northwestern Arkansas, as the parks modernization was funded through a Walton Family Foundation Design Excellence Program grant. The upgrade was commissioned by the Downtown Springdale Alliance to help jumpstart development in downtown Springdale and bring more public plazas and outdoor entertainment to the city.

The new master plan for the 14-acre Luther George Park will add 200 new native trees and will re-center the park with a new Performance Pavilion, a curving, multipurpose archway that can do everything from host concerts to act as a passive shade structure when not in use.

The pavilions Cor-ten steel cladding will weather and patina naturally over time, letting it gradually blend in with the environment. The pavilion will front the parks great lawn and will be bounded in the rear by berm, creating a natural seating configuration and helping to further disguise the structures impact on the landscape. In a press release announcing the overhaul, the design team attributed the pavilions future flexibility to the theater rigging integrated into the structure itself. Once complete, the pavilion will be capable of accommodating up to 3,000 concertgoers and about 50-to-100 movie viewers at a time on the smaller lawn at the back (in a post-COVID world, of course).

We believe strongly in the power of landscapes to inform our architecture the performance pavilion draws inspiration from the rolling hills of the landscape and the strong axial connection between the river and downtown Springdale. It is both an icon and deeply embedded in the context, said Trey Trahan, founder and CEO of Trahan Architects in the same project announcement.

No timetable for the projects completion, or cost, has been announced at the time of writing.

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Trahan Architects and Spackman Mossop Michaels will overhaul a major Arkansas park - The Architect's Newspaper