The Rogers Partners / ASD|SKY / Ken Smith Workshop design for the new St. Pete Pier creates a destination that embraces the Pier’s role both as an icon for the City of St. Petersburg and an integral part of the vitality of downtown – a place for tourists and the local community alike, one that honors its history, while establishing a new icon for a 21st century public place.
The reimagined St. Pete Pier is a 12-acre armature of rich, local, and destination-based programming adaptable over time as recreation and quality of life grow and change with generations. Activities are diversified through flexible planning and programming that elevates and establishes a sustainable relationship between the natural and built environments.
Diverse, unique spaces enable active and passive connections to the bay: a coastal thicket, wet classroom, tilted lawn, and places for dining, fishing, boating, and swimming. Hydrodynamic modeling was conducted, resulting in the introduction of a new artificial reef and breakwater, helping to create a naturalized beach frontage and produce calmed water, both enhancing recreational use and providing more suitable environments for marine animals and seagrass habitats. Organized as a linear cut through the uplands, the one-acre Coastal Thicket emerges alongside the pier to the education center. Establishing new microecologies, this landscape experience provides both an educational opportunity and a shaded passage from beach drive to the heart of the pier.
The Pier does not take you to a place – the pier is the place.
The Pier extends the city’s green necklace of downtown parks and activities over the water, out onto the pier. Rather than a singular and heavily programmed destination at the pierhead, our design is a platform for a multitude of smaller and more flexible programs and experiences for both tourists and the local community – from children to seniors, nature lovers to boaters, fishermen to fine diners. It is a hub for activity from start to finish.
Location: St. Petersburg, FL | Completion: 2020 | Size: 250,000 SF | Client: City of St. Petersburg
