With its beginnings as a farming community, the town of Peoria, AZ boasts a well-preserved historic district with original vernacular architecture, expressing the simple aesthetic arising from utilitarian structures – designed to house families, their animals, and the tools that cultivated the land. Working in close collaboration with landscape architect, EPG (Environmental Planning Group), HSS created a series of park structures that would serve as backdrops for natural landscape and recreation features throughout. Close to the historic core, the park design acknowledges the town’s history while embracing its rapid growth and accommodating a wide range of activities, from regional baseball tournaments, holiday special events, daily jogs, and community gardening.

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Merging with the landscape, park structures are created with a vocabulary of tilt up concrete walls reflecting natural textures and a modular rhythm of exposed structural elements. The 85-acre site includes softball fields, soccer fields, a dog park, splash pad, playgrounds, picnic ramadas and a 5-acre urban fishing lake. Generous overhangs protect visitors from intense sun exposure and provide microclimates for picnic areas, play spaces, restrooms and concession stands. Minimal construction budget challenged design team to use program requirements to drive aesthetics with limited use of full height walls, open structure, integral environmental graphics, bright colors and textured cast-in-place concrete.

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“Peoria’s new community park will help bring residents together and foster more community pride in the downtown area,” city officials stated at it’s opening in the Fall of 2013. Pioneer Park will serve close to 1 million residents and visitors each year with both organized events and daily visits.