One Park Jax
Welcome to Jacksonville
Waterfront parks are a civic superpower. They really do bring a city together—like the neighborhood your city would be if your city were a neighborhood. Holding close to this deceptively simple truth is what won us the national competition to redesign the former site of the Jacksonville Landing: ONE PARK for all of Jacksonville.
It’s an ambitious ask of a more than 8-acre site cloistered between the St. Johns River and the city’s downtown business district.
We rose to the challenge with a highly programmed design that finds just the right balance of spaces, places, and visual expression to evolve with the city for decades to come. The design activates the site along its edges to draw people into the park. The interplay of landscape and art within unfolds into a timeless experience of the city’s beloved river.
Where River City Meets the River
To create a civic space as iconic and memorable as St. Louis’s Gateway Arch Park or Millennium Park in Chicago, the site would need to engage the water—of course—but it would also need to create strong connections to the city, both the immediate district and farther-flung neighborhoods.
Landforms embrace key buildings at the northeast and northwest corners of the site, nurturing that reciprocal relationship with the urban experience. A civic stair leads up to the spectacular waterlike sculpture. Inside, the variety of grand and intimate moments honor the river as the main event.
We activated the corners of the site at different elevations to feed into a winding journey through fountains and splashpads, a stormwater marsh, and a magisterial staircase.
The “natural play” destination in the southwest corner is large and highly designed on a sculptural topography. It weaves together rocky outcrops and embedded hill slides, treehouses and lushly planted slopes, rope bridges and a sandbox. One Park really is a playground for all ages.
