Parks Commission meets with Design Review Board to flesh out Overlake Urban Park

On November 7th, 6:30PM at Redmond City Hall, the Design Review Board will meet with the Parks Commission to discuss the proposed Overlake 2.7 acre Urban Park.  Below is some background on the meeting:



In December 2011, the City Council approved a Master Plan for the redevelopment of the former Group Health Overlake hospital property. The Master Plan envisioned a complete transformation of the 28-acre site, with approximately 1,400 new residential units, 1.2 million square feet of commercial uses, a hotel, as well as 2.7 acres of parkland in the middle of the site. Read More >>Since that time, Capstone Partners has purchased the site and begun its redevelopment. As part of that effort, they have chosen to design, construct, operate and maintain the park themselves. This will significantly advance the schedule for the park and provide a more immediate benefit to the future residents and workers who will use the park.

For the last couple of months, Capstone has been analyzing the park site, how it will relate to the surrounding streets and development, and developing a set of design goals for the future park. Within the package of materials that were submitted for this meeting, a diagram is included which shows several different potential activity zones, gateway points into the park, and the park’s relationship to the hillclimb urban pathway along its north perimeter.

At this early stage of design, City Staff wanted to hold a joint session of the Design Review Board and Parks & Trails Commission to work with Capstone to flesh out a design vision for the park, which will enable Capstone to develop different concepts for the park. There are three questions that Staff would like to have the Board and Commission weigh in on to help develop a vision for the park:

1. What are the key design elements that should be included in the park?

2. What are the best ways that different spaces within the park can be connected, especially the interface of the park and the hillclimb pathway?

3. What activities would you like to see in the park? Should the park be more active or more passive?
 This joint session of the Board and Commission will be the first meeting in a series of public meetings over the next few months on the design of the park. A community meeting will be held on December 4th to further discuss the vision for the park and goals for how it should be programmed. Following this meeting, Capstone will begin to develop design options for the park site and share their concepts at subsequent public meetings in January 2014.