Iconic Park Completes a Community
Metropolis
Feature
News
Published
July, 2026
Tags
Downtown Cary Park, Public Spaces, Master Plans
Metropolis published a feature on Downtown Cary Park, highlighting how the transformative public space has become a centerpiece for the growing community of Cary, North Carolina. Learn how Machado Silvetti, in collaboration with OJB Landscape Architecture, helped shape the park through its architecture and pavilion design.
In North Carolina, an Iconic Park Completes a Community
Downtown Cary Park in North Carolina by Machado Silvetti and OJB. A tree is tucked into the southernmost curl of the serpentine pavilion, echoing a tree and planter in the park’s first phase
Cary, North Carolina, is a city without a center. An emerging fourth point in North Carolina’s Research Triangle—slowly transforming it into the Research Quadrangle—Cary historically has been a bedroom community for larger cities like Raleigh and Durham. In line with the suburban logic that informed its formation, its geography is one of streets and nodes, commercial strips and setback shopping centers. Walking through town on a recent Saturday morning, Jeffry Burchard, a principal at the Boston-based architecture firm Machado Silvetti, pointed out the many land uses and building types along a single street: “Residential, church, civic building, high school, storefront—it’s such a mix of pieces,” he said.
Sited near the dog park, the Bark Bar features the most dramatic, swooping roof forms, matching the wildness of the nature nearby.
A detailed and refined flooring pattern compliment the roof texture and landscape
“Phase 1 actually grabs the first lobe of the first pavilion, then it spins off,” Burchard said. “It becomes the programmatic spin off, the cultural spin off, the planting spin off—it just loosens itself up. By the time you get to the Bark Bar, it’s at its loosest. Everything’s just totally”—he waved both of his arms wildly.
The pavilions’ extensive use of latte-colored brick and wood creates a natural material language that Burchard said is inspired by the palette of the Piedmont region: “The color of the forest is super green, but there’s also a brownness to it, an earthiness,” he said.
“There’s nothing gray about North Carolina,” Beer added.
The park opened in 2023. Reflecting on the project, the designers said that the ability to insert such formally adventurous architecture into what many might see as a sleepy southern town emerged precisely from the hodge-podge quality of Cary’s urbanism. That looseness, Burchard said, was architecturally freeing. “If it was all one monolithic kind of experience,” he said, “it would have been harder to introduce something so foreign.”
The design of the central performance pavilion is inspired by the forests of North Carolina and the furniture of Isamu Noguchi.
Working with the site’s existing topography, OJB and Machado Silvetti conceptualized a tiered park that steps down from the south and west sides, creating an experiential gradient that begins as a fancily paved, architecturally defined urban plaza at the top of the park and grows ever wilder as one descends, culminating with a rushing stream lined with billowing willows, a lotus-filled pond, and a forest “room” comprised of little more than mulch, birdsong, and a smattering of Adirondack chairs. Throughout, a series of floating bridges offer elevated vantage points while never allowing the entirety of the park to be fully glimpsed.
A mass timber structure for events looks out to the park’s stream and botanical garden.
Glowing like a lantern at night, the more orthogonal pavilion was a late addition to the park program.
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Blurring the line between landscape and architecture, Downtown Cary Park is the centerpiece of an investment by the Town of Cary to enhance, expand, and protect the public vibrancy of their growing community. Machado Silvetti designed five pavilions within the park, providing programs including food and beverage, public restrooms, events and performance venues. In these pavilions the curved lines of the landscape become three dimensional. Owing to their geometric formation, these pavilions invite the landscape and experience of the park-scape into deep spatial, formal and most importantly experiential, interlocution.
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Downtown Cary Park received two 2026 national design awards from the American Institute of Architects, recognizing its integration of architecture, landscape, and urban design. The park earned an AIA Regional and Urban Design Award, while its Bark Bar Pavilion received an AIA Small Project Award.
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