The international design team RiverParc won the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Downtown design competition with a bold gesture -- connecting Fort Duquesne Boulevard with the Allegheny River by putting a green lid on the 10th Street Bypass.

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The other big feature of the "Cultural District Riverfront Development" -- a more distinctive name will come later -- is the use of Eighth Street as the retail spine and focal point of the project, connecting Penn Avenue with the river. The winner was chosen from a field of four teams of developers, financiers and designers.

"They had a thorough understanding of the site," Thomas L. VanKirk, project chairman for the Cultural Trust, said yesterday of the RiverParc team. Architect, critic and jury member Robert Campbell said RiverParc "dealt intelligently with every significant urban-design issue."

VanKirk also said the jury was impressed with the international team's compatibility: "They had built up a cohesive and collaborative relationship among all the members of the team."

The predominantly glass buildings would significantly increase the scale and sophistication of riverfront housing in Pittsburgh, bringing it a little more in line with new waterfront developments in London, Amsterdam and other cities.

Another plus for RiverParc is that its plan is modular and can be built in phases, allowing development to proceed if and when buildings are acquired. While most of the six-acre site is now Trust-owned surface parking, a few buildings remain in private hands. The four-story, Trust-owned building at 801 Penn Ave., which has a modern exterior and houses the offices of Pittsburgh Opera, will be demolished after the opera moves to a new location in the Cultural District. No historic buildings will be demolished; the new buildings will be erected around them.

One of the biggest challenges for the architects will be making the highly contemporary new buildings compatible with the historic ones on Penn Avenue. RiverParc provided no drawings showing the Penn Avenue side of the development.

In about six weeks, the architects could begin seeking public input on the design of all of the project's buildings, which will have operable windows. That's one of several environmentally friendly features, including the use of natural light, that will contribute to making the development a pilot project in a new category of green-building certification for neighborhood development.

The project also will be literally green. A perspective drawing of Eighth Street shows a sort of hanging gardens effect, with plants spilling over balconies. Some of the buildings will have wintergardens several stories tall and many of the lower buildings will have rooftop gardens.

The cover over the 10th Street Bypass would run from the Clemente Bridge to the Rachel Carson Bridge; it will be known as Three Sisters Gallery (honoring the "Three Sisters" bridges at Sixth, Seventh and Ninth streets, now the Clemente, Warhol and Carson bridges). The gallery is proposed as a park-like space with trees and plazas; drawings show steps, terraced gardens and a water feature leading to Allegheny Riverfront Park.

The design team, led by Concord Eastridge of Washington, D.C., comprises four firms:

Behnisch Architekten, Stuttgart, Germany (www.behnisch.com), will serve as design architect, taking the lead on the look and green features of the buildings. Behnisch is known for environmentally sustainable projects in Europe and America, including the Genzyme Center, a medical research facility in Cambridge, Mass., which earned the highest rating in green-building certification and where 75 percent of employees are able to work with natural light alone.

GEHL Architects, Copenhagen, Denmark (www.gehlarchitects.dk), is the project's master planner and landscape architect. It has worked on master planning and urban design projects for city centers and brownfield sites in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

architectsAlliance, Toronto, Canada (www.architectsalliance.com), is the residential architect, with projects across Canada and overseas, including the master plan and buildings for a community of 50,000 at the Dubai Marina.

WTW Architects, Pittsburgh (www.wtwarchitects.com). As architect of record, WTW is the design team's local liaison and representative. Founded in 1959, WTW has built its practice in recent years by specializing in student unions for more than 50 American colleges and universities.

Transsolar, Stuttgart, Germany, is the climate engineer and Gateway Engineers, Pittsburgh, is the civil engineer; Turner Construction is the general contractor.