2025 Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award
Downtown Cary Park

Feature
News

Published
September 30, 2025

Project
Downtown Cary Park

We are pleased to share that Downtown Cary Park has won Fast Company’s 2025 Innovation by Design Award in the Urban Design category, recognizing a project that balances everyday life, environmental resilience, and catalytic economic planning—delivered through close collaboration between Machado Silvetti, OJB Landscape Architecture, and the Town of Cary. Fast Company’s Innovation by Design honors projects that advance practice while delivering measurable public value. Downtown Cary Park exemplifies that standard by integrating public life, programming, and resilient stormwater infrastructure into everyday human behaviors as well as special events, and through collaborative planning that has amplified economic returns across the broader downtown. The award recognizes not simply an attractive park but a method—one that prioritizes human comfort, recreation, environmental performance, and an exemplary civic design partnership.

A park shaped by everyday needs

What makes Downtown Cary Park feel effortless is a long string of deliberate, small decisions intended to support ordinary human routines. Machado Silvetti Design Principal Jeffry Burchard captured the approach in Cary Town Manager Sean Stegall's recent book Top of the Arc: “We talked about intangible qualities rather than specific things. In landscape architecture that means — I want to be able to bring my dog there, I want to be able to play chess there, I want to be able to eat lunch there, I want to listen to a concert there.” Those simple desires belie the complexity of the design choices required to make them possible—seating and shade that work year‑round, sightlines that feel safe and inviting, and flexible spaces that accommodate both solitary moments and communal events. Burchard adds, “As designers, the intangibles help us catch more amount people’s interests. You can gauge what people are talking about.” In Cary, prioritizing those intangibles produces a park that invites repeat visits and multiple modes of use rather than a single programmed function.

Infrastructure as Landscape

OJB’s landscape strategy reframes stormwater management as a defining element of the park’s character. Camouflaged retention basins, rain gardens, and a central pond do more than hold back floodwaters that once ravaged neighborhoods to the south; they become memorable places for play, reflection, and learning. A creeklike children’s splash pad and winding elevated walkways dramatize the site’s 37‑foot elevation change, while hundreds of new trees—about 600 plantings among them—create shade and a sense of escape in the urban center. These infrastructure moves are not afterthoughts but organizing devices that stitch utility and experience together.

A catalytic investment

Built with $65 million in bond funding, Downtown Cary Park was conceived not only as a civic amenity but as a lever for future growth. The transformation around the park quickly altered the market: within a year of opening, the city’s tax base rose by nearly $300 million. That swift development response reflects both the park’s appeal and the team’s coordinating work to strategize adjacent sites for housing, retail, and offices. In this way the park functions like high‑value real estate—“like oceanfront property,” OJB Principal Cody Klein says—by improving the prospects of surrounding parcels and shaping investment patterns.

Collaboration and shared stewardship

The achievement in Cary is as much organizational as it is design driven. Machado Silvetti and OJB worked in close partnership with the Town of Cary to preserve design intent across complex technical requirements, programming goals, and long‑term planning. “We shared a common belief that we don’t leave vision to somebody else,” Burchard said—an ethic that kept the team aligned through decision points large and small. That shared ownership enabled nimble problem‑solving during design and construction and ensured the park opened as an integrated civic asset rather than a series of disconnected pieces.

Why this award matters

Downtown Cary Park now stands as a model for cities seeking to combine resilience, hospitality, and development potential in a compact civic landscape. Machado Silvetti, OJB Landscape Architecture, the Town of Cary, and the many consultants and contractors involved have produced a place that proves careful design, and shared vision can remake a downtown and, in doing so, reshape a city’s future.

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