The winning design team drew inspiration from Clyde Warren Park in Dallas, building a terrace over a busy driveway with green spaces, social areas and walkways.

Patricia Cerda was part of the first place team, the Mav Tracers. She said the group’s design was also influenced by the 2005–2020 UTA Master Plan, which also proposed an area above Cooper Street.

“We thought, ‘Well, they thought about it too, so it can’t be a crazy idea,'” she said.

The Cerdy Group was one of 40 companies that proposed the modernization of the north and south bridges of UTA. Mav Tracers and other bidding groups will meet with a design team selected by the city for the project.

Both university and city leaders have fought for decades to secure and recognize the campus along Cooper Street. The university built the bridges and lowered the roadway in 1989, four months after graduate student Andy Beck died while crossing at street level. In 2016, Aeneida college graduate Lisette Sorto was also hit and killed while crossing the street.

The university observed a “growing number of injuries” on the street between the 1960s and 1980s, according to UTA’s library accessibility history. Student groups in the 80s petitioned for the Cooper Street speed limit to be lowered to 20 mph during heavy foot traffic.

According to the UTA Library, former president Wendell Nedderman called the street “an open sore running through campus.”

In addition, barrier walls and bridges make it difficult for commuters to easily understand that they are passing through campus, Cerda said.

“It was so wild for me when people talked about the fact that I live in Arlington all my life, and I live in Cooper, and I never knew that there was a university there,” she said.

University President Jennifer Cowley said she called the competition as UTA ​​planned to upgrade the bridges. It is also a way to involve the community in creating a more pleasant and recognizable space.

“This bridge is not just for UTA, but for our community as a whole and for our community to feel like they’re getting a gateway,” Cowley said.

She said the Clyde Warren park-inspired redesign of Mav Tracers was a common theme during the competition, as well as designs that more clearly identified the underpass as a UTA campus.

“Whether it was lighting, murals, or other types of iconography, it was really about how we can tell the story of UTA across these bridges?” Cawley said.

The competition challenged students to create a multi-stage project.

The first phase of Mav Tracers will include finding murals and advertising for the project, identifying green spaces for future development, and improving lighting on the walkways during the first year of construction.

Serda said her group decided that abandoning the bridge improvement project would not satisfy the university’s desire for more connectivity between the two parts of the campus.

“That was a conversation we had in our team and we felt like, ‘Yes, the university could make these bridges better and prettier and brighter, but if you leave them as they are, they don’t really connect anything.’ , – she said. .

Any advice? Email Kaylie Broussard at [email protected]. You can follow Kaylee on Twitter. @CayleeBrussard.

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