Waterloo Park: Reclaiming Public Space in the Center of Austin

Honor Award

General Design

Austin, Texas, United States
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.
Client: Waterloo Greenway Conservancy

The Spearhead of a New Park System

Waterloo Park has helped to catalyze activity in downtown Austin, launching Waterloo Greenway, a future chain of parks along Waller Creek.

Image Credit: Photo by John Sutfin, Courtesy of Waterloo Greenway Conservancy
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Pushing Back on Infrastructure Impacts

A 400-foor post-structured beam reclaims a half-acre of parkland that was lost a result of Waller Creek's flood bypass tunnel.

Image Credit: Watershed Protection Department, Austin
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Augmenting the Oak Frame

Live oaks were threatened by nearby construction (like this 4-story, 330,000-pound tree) were transplanted into the park's existing tree perimeter.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Waterloo Greenway
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Investing in Downtown's Civic Spaces

The park creates new spaces for the community and helps bridge between the revitalized creek, the State Capitol, and a new cultural venue.

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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Accessible and Inviting Circulation

A coiling promenade provides accessible routes within the steep site, preserves existing trees, and curates multilayered spaces within the park.

Image Credit: Photo by Brian Fitzsimmons, Courtesy of Waterloo Greenway Conservancy
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A Winding, Layered Landscape

The elevated walkway shapes dynamic experiences of the park landscape — walking amidst tree canopies above or enjoying the shade below.

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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Opportunities for Exploration

The coiling promenade is complemented by accessible ground-level walks, a rich carpet of ground plain planting, and a scramble path loop.

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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Embracing Local Ecosystems

The overlap of various paths creates a protected environment for immersive moments within the native ecology of the Texas Hill Country Garden.

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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Placemaking in Pools and Eddies

The promenade overlooks new "eddies" of park program - play landscapes, small plazas, quiet seating niches, stormwater gardens.

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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Shaded Gatherings

The canopies of two live oaks create welcoming shade over a multi-purpose deck installed with an innovative approach to avoid damaging their root mats

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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Spectacle in the Park

The amphitheater sits just below a Capitol view corridor, with all back-of-house and audience services tucked into the cross-section of the park.

Image Credit: Ryan Vestil
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A Versatile Community Space

Revenue-producing events help underwrite free community-based programs - including cultural festivals, dance classes, yoga, and art installations.

Image Credit: Photo by Suzanne Cordiero, Courtesy of Waterloo Greenway Conservancy
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Habitat Creation in a Dense Urban Environment

Park ecosystems are supported by a series of features that conduct surface water from the site.

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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A Reinvented Creek Channel

Water from the tunnel emerges from a headwater seep, an interpretation of the geology of an emergent spring that feeds into Waller Creek.

Image Credit: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.
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Blending Infrastructure and Ecology

The constructed ecology brings together the machine-like features of the tunnel and the naturalism that heralds the reinvention of Waller Creek.

Image Credit: Elizabeth Felicella
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Reclaiming Public Space Along Waller Creek

A reimagined relationship between flood control infrastructure and civic space has enable renewed ecology and social activity along the creek.

Image Credit: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.
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“

What an extraordinary social, cultural, and ecological addition to this city, and making it an astonishing project! The design successfully stitches-together both urban and ecological environments, forming a network for social gathering at both large and small scales.

”

- 2025 Awards Jury

Project Credits

Nicholas Elkovitch, Associate Principal

Project Statement

Waterloo Park is the ﬁrst phase of the public-private joint venture to ambitiously transform the blighted Waller Creek into a 1.5-mile-long greenway and chain of parks that connect East Austin and the downtown. Waterloo Park was originally prone to severe ﬂooding and overuse during community events before being identiﬁed as the site for a ﬂoodwater bypass tunnel inlet —infrastructure that removes 28 acres from the ﬂoodplain downstream. The redevelopment of the park is the tip of the spear for the future greenway, deﬁning a language for the entire park system and creating a public space spectacle out of the co-location of this ﬂood infrastructure, a performance venue, and a robust native landscape rarely seen in Austin parks.

Project Narrative

Pushing Infrastructural Boundaries

The City’s investment in an underground ﬂood control tunnel prompted the challenge for a new conservancy to guide Waller Creek’s reinvention as an armature for the rapidly developing area now removed from the creek’s ﬂoodplain. While the core of Waterloo Park was devastated by the construction of this ﬂood control infrastructure, the park’s redesign leverages its presence with the tactical addition of a 400-foot-long post-tensioned beam on which to restore lost park area. This structural addition allows park program to reclaim the center of this community-oriented space and frees the design to invent unique solutions to accessibility, programming, and placemaking.

Integrating a Catalytic Program

Sandwiched between a view corridor to the state capitol dome and the site’s ﬂood plain elevation, the project integrates a state-of-the-art performance venue into the cross section of the site. Venues such as this often struggle to be economically and operationally viable and tend to overwhelm the sites in which they sit. Here, a “park ﬁrst” philosophy governed the design to avoid creating a dead space in the park and to minimize its impact on site experience for daily park users. While the lattice-like canopy over the stage signals park entry, the rest of the 25,000 square-foot facility is invisible from most points in the park as it is stepped down from the street elevation and its roof is covered in landscape and terraces. This conﬁguration is a ﬁrst-of-its-kind for a venue of this scale, with the back-of-house roof also serving as the public entrance to the venue. Complimenting the national acts that visit the park and its audiences, an almost equal number of community-based events utilize the facility to bring the community into the park for yoga, dance classes, art installations, and the return of cultural festivals to Waterloo Park.

Cultivating the Relationship of Planting and Program in a Park

The existing oaks that survived the tunnel inlet construction are augmented by large oak transplants from adjacent development sites to form a thick frame around the park perimeter. Surrounding the central lawn that anchors the venue, the rest of the park landscape is formed as a series of landscape “eddies” that choreograph slow meanders from the oak frame into the park. The dramatic topography, the range of pathway and seating types, and the unique vantage points built atop the ﬂood infrastructure a=ord a highly eclectic collection of garden-like spaces. Each of these spaces unfold into one another when walking through the park: a Hill Country garden, grassy rain gardens lined with palo verde, a wood deck carefully installed under a pair of existing oaks, a play area organized around an in-grade slide set into an embankment of stone scrambles, a small plaza shrouded in desert willow, a perched wetland terrace with an emergent cypress edge. Water drawn from the bypass tunnel emerges from a newly constructed seep at the southeast corner of the site along a reinvented creek bed lined with caliche blocks, forming the headwater spring to herald the downtown reach of creek and its forthcoming trail system. The unifying oak canopy around the park is juxtaposed with a rich tapestry of ground plane plantings composed of 132 species. Ninety-ﬁve percent of the park’s plant species are native to central Texas, reducing irrigation needs and providing substantial habitat for native pollinators.

Products

Furniture
- Vestra Via
Fences/Gates/Walls
- Hoover Fence Co.
- Maxiforce
Parks/Recreation Equipment
- Richter Spiegeräte
- APE Studio Inc.
Hardscape
- Whiteacre
- Hanover
Lighting
- Focus Industries
- Metero
- BK Lighting
- Vestre

Plant List

Hardy Century Plant
Squid Agave
Shindaggers
Whale Tongue Agave
Parry’s Agave
Agave
Ajuga
Blue Elf Aloe
Soap Aloe
False Freesia
Hinckley’s Gold Columbine
Purple Three Awn
Antelope Horn Milkweed
Butterfly Milkweed
Green Milkweed
Anacacho Orchid Tree
Mexican Orchid Tree
Cross Vine
Side Oats Grama
Blonde Ambition Gramagrass
Orange Septre Butterflybush
Orange Bulbine
Yellow Pride of Barbados
Pride of Barbados
American Beautyberry
Bush’s Winecup
Wine Cups
Horseherb
Common Wood Sedge
Cherokee Sedge
Berkeley Sedge
Meadow Sedge
Texas sedge
Senna
Northern Sea Oats
Purple Leatherflower
Blue Mistflower
Greg’s Mist Flower
Montbretia
Crinum Lily
Batface
Feather Plume
Black Dalea
Greg’s Dalea
Texas Sotol
Sotol
Silver Pony Foot
Fortnight lily
Southern Wood Fern
Snake Herb
Pale Cone Flower
Purple Coneflower
Coralbean
Creeping Fig
Prairie Verbena
Guara
Mexican Fire Bush
Giant False Yucca
Red Yucca
Red Swamp Mallow
Oak Leaf Hydrangea
Spider Lily
Himilayan Indigo
Lindheimer’s Indigo
Standing Cypress
Prairie June Grass
Cenizo
Texas Gayfeather
Perennial Flax
Agarita
Turk’s Cap
False Aloe
Bigfoot Water Clover
Live Oak
Pecan
Texas Red Oak
Escarpment Live Oak
Lacey Oak
Bur Oak
Chinkapin
Schumard Oak
Southern Catalpa
Mexican Sycamore
Mexican White Oak
Bald Cypress
Montezuma Cypress
Red Buckeye
Teaxas Redbud
Desert Willow
Mexican Plum
Huisache
Texas Kidney-wood
Wax Myrtle
Palo Verde Tree
Honey Mesquite
Texas Mountain Laurel
Anacacho Orchid Tree
Mexican Orchid Tree
Smoketree
Texas Persimmon