Memorial Park Master Plan

The Memorial Park Master Plan is a project born out of the need to rejuvenate one of Houston’s most loved green spaces after years of public use and damage suffered from extreme weather events such as droughts and Gulf Coast storms. The Memorial Park consists of 1,500-acres of pine forest, meadow grasses, oak forest, and deep ravines. In 2011, Houston suffered a severe drought that damaged the poorly maintained forest, and more than half of the trees were irrevocably damaged.

In 2013, Sherwood Design Engineers embarked on a multi-year Master Plan and project implementation process with Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects to envision and build this central nationally recognized park in Downtown Houston. Our work involved all aspects of civil engineering with notable accomplishment to create stormwater management strategies that reused stormwater for irrigation by redirecting existing collection points and retaining water for later use. We engineered sustainable solutions to mitigate erosion on the adjacent Buffalo Bayou and implemented Low Impact Development techniques to retain water and help native ecologies flourish. Key challenges included designing for Texas’ extreme weather fluctuations and the region’s widening gap between rain events.