magazine.texasarchitects.org | by Aaron Seward

A clearing in the forest. The boardwalk has brought you here, as if to show it to you. But why? What is there to see? Clearly, something dreadful happened here. So many of the trees are dead, skeletal boughs and broken stumps slanting in the bright air, sagging with vines. The ground is a riot of grasses and shrubs, trickling streams and murky puddles, decaying trunks sinking in the mud. The sun glints from leaves and water and insects, suffusing your eyes with silvery flashes of light. 

The scene is mesmerizing. Is this landscape living or dying? It is both. It is in the middle of a process. It is becoming something else. 

The point of the boardwalk winding this way is not to show you this scene. The point is to show you this place, over time, as it transitions into what it will be next. 

The place is the recently opened Eastern Glades of Memorial Park in Houston, which has been undergoing a redevelopment — really a resuscitation — based on a master plan designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBW). The exact place within this 1,500-acre urban forest is a stand of woods and wetland between the newly constructed Hines Lake and the old golf course, where a fault line creates a catchment for rain. This zone has intentionally been left in its wild condition — or, more accurately, it has been fallowed.

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