Heatherwick Studio Rethinks the Belvedere, and Louisville Gets a Better Park for It
Heatherwick Studio has released a new set of renderings for the Belvedere, the elevated public terrace that has sat above Interstate 64 on the Louisville riverfront since 1973. The images show a scheme that has been substantially reworked since the studio's first proposal, and they arrive as the project moves toward a construction start this autumn.
The Belvedere is 5.5 acres, roughly four football pitches, and it is not a park in any conventional sense. It is a concrete deck. Underneath it is the largest parking garage in the city, which serves the KFC Yum! Center and the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, and beneath that the interstate runs along the water. The original design was by the Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis and opened to the public on 27 April 1973. For a while it worked. Then it became the sort of place people crossed rather than went to.
The immediate reason anything is happening at all is unglamorous. The garage below needs structural repair, and once the deck comes up, the surface on top is going to be rebuilt regardless. Mayor Craig Greenberg has been direct about the sequence. "This garage must and will be fixed," he said. "While we are at it, we want to reimagine the Belvedere and transform it into an iconic new destination."
Fireflies over the plaza
The centrepiece of the new design is the Firefly Pavilion, and it is the element that will decide whether this project is remembered. It is not a building in the usual sense. It is a half shell assembled from dozens of slender curved lightposts, each one carrying a single lamp at its tip, fanned upward from a low stage into something between a bandshell and a seed head. Lit at night, over an audience on the grass, it does exactly what the name promises.
The lamp is the design language of the whole site, which is the smarter move here. The same curved post appears at pedestrian scale along the paths, in clusters at the plaza edges, and then it walks off the deck entirely and out into the surrounding streets, where the posts arc over the roadway and cross above traffic. It is a cheap and legible way to tell a driver or a cyclist several blocks away that they are approaching something. Public spaces on decks fail because nobody can see them from the ground. This one advertises itself.
The plaza is the second big move, and it is where the design has changed most. It sits on the western end near the Muhammad Ali Center and the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, a broad paved bowl with market stalls, planting and trees ringing it, feeding into the pavilion lawn beyond. The renderings show it in autumn with vendors under canopies and the river visible past the tree line, which is a fair statement of ambition: an everyday surface that can absorb a farmers market on a Saturday and a crowd of several thousand on a festival night.
What got cut, and why
The version Heatherwick showed in February 2025 was a different animal. It had a large grass-covered wave form sitting on top of the highway overpass, a ribbon of landscape that lifted and looped across the site, and the built portion extended out over the river itself. That is the scheme that got the attention, and it is the scheme that has been scaled back.
The reason was load. Strengthening the elevated span over I-64 enough to carry that much soil and structure would have cost, in the words of project executive Layla George, "a lot of money." So the emphasis moved inland, onto the part of the site already sitting over the garage, where the structure can be reinforced more cheaply. "What we're looking at now is kind of that 'wow moment,' and the 'big deal' will be over the garage, kind of closer to the Muhammad Ali Center and Kentucky Center for the Arts," George said.
The river edge did not disappear, it got demoted. It is now, as George put it, "an enhancement so that people have some shade and some nice space to enjoy the river view." The renderings bear that out. The overlook and the stair down toward the water are handsome, generously lit, and modest. They are a good edge to a park rather than the reason you came.
Losing the signature gesture is usually how these projects get worse. In this case it may have made the thing more likely to be built and more likely to be used, because the money went into the surface people actually stand on. The unbuilt version was a photograph. The current version is a place.
The money and the calendar
The total is estimated at $125 million. Roughly $10 million is committed from city bond funds and $7 million came through a federal appropriation secured by Senator Mitch McConnell. A share of a $100 million state allocation is still undetermined, and Greenberg has said he will return to the Kentucky General Assembly in January and raise the balance locally from philanthropic and private sources. The stated target is about 85 percent public money with private funding covering the rest, which leaves a meaningful gap to close while construction is already underway.
The work itself starts with demolition of the existing planting and hardscape over the interstate and the garage, new waterproofing, new interior space within the deck, and reinforcement so the surface can carry food trucks and emergency vehicles. Construction is anticipated to begin this autumn. Completion is targeted for 2030.
Whether it works
Heatherwick Studio's American record in public space is mixed in a way that is worth naming. Little Island in New York is a genuine success, a small artificial landscape that people use constantly. Vessel in Hudson Yards is the opposite, an object that photographed well and then had to be closed and re-engineered. The difference between them was never the sculptural idea. It was whether the space around the object did anything.
The Belvedere renderings suggest the studio learned that lesson. The pavilion is the picture, but the plan underneath it is mostly lawn, paving, planting and paths, sized for markets, concerts and ordinary weekday afternoons. Thomas Heatherwick has framed it in those terms. "For more than 50 years, the Belvedere has been a stage for public life in Louisville," he said. "But over time it's become barren and disconnected from the energy of the city around it." The aim, he said, is "a greener, more welcoming urban heart, where everyday life can take place: from chance encounters and children's play to festivals, performances and community celebrations."
That is the right target for a city of 630,000 that has spent decades watching its downtown empty out after the show lets out. Louisville does not need another object to look at from the highway. It needs somewhere to stand between the arena, the concert hall and the river, on a Tuesday, with nothing particular planned. On the evidence of these images, that is what has been designed.
