Meydenbauer Bay Park Phase 2

The Meydenbauer Bay Park Gateway site model illustrates a multidisciplinary team’s approach to modernizing the 2010 Meydenbauer Bay Park and Land Use Plan to meet 2024’s conditions and priorities while expanding the park and reconnecting downtown to its waterfront.

Modeling has been integral to project success. The physical model played a critical role in shaping design and strengthening the narrative that garnered city and community support. Focusing on an area that is difficult to understand in plan view and built to be easily swapped with alternate design options, the topography is rendered in chipboard with balsa wood structures and paper vegetation. Ideation continues to center on modeling, iterating between digital tools and hand sketches to refine experience and form.

Both project and models demonstrate how landscape architecture can respond to evolving urban landscapes with optimism—revealing new possibilities, reconnecting people to place, and reestablishing access to water and views.

A Park for All Bellevue: 

Meydenbauer Bay Park is part of a citywide system of parks providing differing scales, activities, amenities, and experiences. The unique opportunity of Meydenbauer is its shoreline location and waterfront access near Bellevue’s thriving urban core. Meydenbauer is intended to be a park for the whole city, a destination for residents and visitors alike to access the Lake Washington waterfront. The design prioritizes waterfront use for all, connecting to the iconic Grand Connection and Old Bellevue, Downtown Park, Downtown Bellevue, and finally to the light rail and Wilburton’s Eastrail corridor.

The park consists of a series of distinct spaces including the completed Phase 1 and the opportunity for future phases (Phase 2 and more), creating a seamless park experience intuitively drawing people to and through the entire park even as they pass through the different activities and character zones.

Bellevue’s Waterfront Roots: 

This was once the site where whaling ships over-wintered. The historic Whaling Building is part of today’s park and houses public restrooms, a public meeting space, and kayak rentals. In the 1940s the dock at the end of the Meydenbauer Gateway site provided access to Lake Washington’s public ferry, connecting to Main Street via today’s Bellevue Place and 100th Ave SE, which run alongside the site. Since the 1940s this waterfront has been privatized with homes and rented boat slips; a central goal of the project is to reprioritize public use of and access to the waterfront.

Embracing Visualization and Ideation as Vision Moves to Reality:

The critical function of the project is to provide intuitive universal access and amazing experience while navigating a 73-foot drop from Bellevue’s Main Street to the water’s edge—without mechanical assistance. Early studies featured a sequence of compelling hand sketches that shaped a park experience centered on journey and connection. The project’s first physical expression took form in the submitted early concept model, which played a critical role in internal team understanding and served as a powerful storytelling tool for the client and public. Continued ideation is underway, primarily utilizing Revit, Rhino, and Lumion, to refine the Gateway site and support project implementation.