Project Overview
Set within the rural town of Corrales, New Mexico, this project reimagines a neglected highway shoulder as a civic landscape, transforming a space once defined by automobile dominance into one centered on pedestrian experience, cultural continuity, and environmental integration. The proposal includes a new community park and an enhanced pedestrian pathway, each contributing to a broader vision for safe, inclusive, and contextually rooted public infrastructure.

Challenge and Design Approach
Corrales Road, the village’s main commercial spine, currently functions more as a vehicular conduit than a public street, offering little protection or engagement for pedestrians. The project addresses this imbalance by recentering the corridor around walkability and social exchange. The new pedestrian pathway replaces a hazardous, dust-worn shoulder with a carefully articulated sequence of surfaces, native plantings, seating, and landscape forms that foster both movement and momentary pause.

Vehicular access is restructured to prioritize safety and coherence. Rather than allowing unregulated pull-offs along Corrales Road, secondary automobile circulation is redirected to side streets and shared parking areas, reducing conflict zones and emphasizing pedestrian-first design at the frontages of businesses and civic institutions.

Community Park and Civic Integration
At the core of the proposal is the creation of a new community park, positioned as both a cultural anchor and an infrastructural hinge between the village library, administration buildings, and surrounding commercial activity. The park’s geometry and spatial logic are derived from traditional agricultural systems, specifically the linearity and proportion of acequia-fed farming plots. This formal translation establishes a powerful visual and cultural continuity between past and present land use practices.

The park operates across multiple scales: it supports programmed events and informal gathering, individual contemplation and community interaction. Plantings are regionally adapted and ecologically responsive, reinforcing both sustainability and visual legibility. Gabion walls, shaded seating, and simple furnishings express a material tectonic drawn from soil architecture and rural vernacular construction.

Material Strategy and Pathway Language
The design language is grounded in restraint and regional specificity. Hardscape materials include stabilized decomposed granite and textured concrete, offering durability while recalling the material palette of agricultural working ground. Custom seating, ABQ Ride transit shelters, and pathway installations adopt modular geometries that reflect mechanical forms seen in irrigation and farming equipment.

Landscape strategies merge ecological restoration with pedestrian experience, native shrubs and grasses define spatial boundaries while softening transitions between road edge and walking path. The use of gabions not only anchors seating and shade structures but subtly evokes erosion-control strategies used in nearby arroyos.

Conclusion
The Corrales Community Park & Pedestrian Pathway project is a model for how rural infrastructural interventions can operate as both public space and environmental repair. By drawing from the village’s agrarian history and material culture, the project cultivates a contemporary landscape rooted in identity, resilience, and civic generosity. What was once a fractured, vehicle-oriented corridor is redefined as a shared place, inviting, legible, and socially engaged.