Present were Utah Department of Transportation engineers and landscape planners, noted architects, an artist who specializes in architectural renderings, the director of the Salt Lake Art Center and out-of-town consultants called in to apply the concept of environmental design known as "context-sensitive solutions" to a 14-mile ribbon of highway in South Davis County.

At the meeting, they viewed photos of parkways elsewhere in the nation, but knew none of the models would translate to Utah's arid climate or vast wetlands around the Great Salt Lake.

Running the meeting was UDOT engineer and Legacy project director John Thomas. His goal: Turn a highway that had been a flashpoint in the argument between environmentalists and those who despise them into a parkway unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

But how?

Former Gov. Mike Leavitt in 1996 declared that the 14-mile Davis County section of what would be a 100-mile Wasatch Front corridor was to be a scenic byway and a parkway. But because there wasn't any such roadway in Utah, during the settlement negotiations that ended four years of legal standoff over environmental standards, the plaintiffs asked a simple question: What's a parkway?

UDOT was stumped. They had no how-to manual. So they took a tour around the country with architects as their guides to see what others had done. Along the way, they concluded parkways had to include interpretive sites, a strong trail system, less emphasis on commuting and more emphasis on scenery, says architect Prescott Muir of Salt Lake City.

The biggest challenge at that November meeting was conveying to engineers creative concepts that could be translated through mathematical calculations into an actual project. It took everyone a while to learn each other's language.

Artists and engineers tossed arcane terminology back and forth.

"What are we asking stone to do?" said architect Lisa Arnett. "Are you going to get that same respect, that historic power of the stone if you're going 55 miles per hour?"

They were talking about bridges and native Farmington stone and how to make art of the mechanically stabilized earthen walls that help to hold them up. But the same principles would apply to all the parkway features: How do you build a road that heals both the damaged landscape and a fractious community?

Art works: Consultant Craig Churchward, a Minneapolis-based context-sensitive expert for the firm HNTB, a nationwide engineering and architectural firm, showed the team how a freeway wall elsewhere in the West had been decorated with animal paw prints.

The artists debated whether that approach would be too literal for Legacy. The engineers just wanted to know where the contractors had put the rebar. It was a perfect example of the culture clash Thomas had carefully arranged.

"Let's not get all Currier & Ives," complained Ric Collier, director of the Salt Lake Art Center, objecting to bird and cattail designs proposed for bridge supports.

Collier believed Legacy could be a 14-mile sculpture; he wanted to see the bridges and walls textured to evoke wave action, the Great Salt Lake shoreline, the horizontal striping that Lake Bonneville left as it receded.

Collier says he views all existence through the lens of art and democracy. In all the team discussions, he kept reminding the team that one of the 10 most important art works of the 20th century - the Spiral Jetty - was just a few miles away, yet few Utahns go see it.

"We take for granted the beauty that surrounds us," he says. To him, the design needs to make Legacy a similar artwork of importance, not just for Utah but for the entire nation.

Quick draw: But first, the team had to get it down on paper - with pencil, crayons and watercolors.

James Porter, a freelance architectural illustrator who lives in southern Salt Lake County, was hired to be a "visual scribe" who would convert in real time what everyone was saying. Porter already had done some renderings for the project, but his job brought an unexpected challenge: He wasn't drawing fast enough.

He thought taking an hour on a sketch was fast work. But he learned to his dismay that discussions changed so much in an hour his work was irrelevant.

So he sketched faster.

"It was extemporaneous. There wasn't time to second-guess," he says. "At times I would get finished and felt I just scribbled."

Porter's sketches became a crucial bridge between engineering problems and artistic vision, Muir says.

"It becomes a purely democratic process," he says. "You pin up the drawings, go around the room and vote."

The Bronx lesson: At the turn of the 20th century, the Bronx River, which ran through filthy industrial zones and slums, was so polluted that animals at the Bronx Zoo were dying. The city of New York rallied to the challenge and in 1907 created a river commission to study how to clean up the river while also healing the landscape and providing transportation routes for the new suburbs outside the city.

Planners decided to make it beautiful, with bridges decorated with native stone, walkways landscaped with native plants, and declared "that all objects foreign to, or distracting from this naturalness of the valley, must be hidden by natural objects where possible."

Completed in 1925, the Bronx River Parkway was the first modern, multilane limited-access parkway in North America. After that followed other parkways in Eastern states, built by the Works Project Administration during the Depression. Newer versions of parkways continued to be built. Then came the modern freeway in the 1950s and '60s, whose sole purpose was to move traffic, not pay attention to the environment.

Churchward says he finds remarkable parallels between Legacy's planning goals and those of the New York river commission, and views the Utah experiment as a way to bring enjoyment back to commuting.

"You want to be able to feel you're part of the landscape. How you lay out the road is critical," he says.

Nature's way: On a field trip to the Legacy Nature Preserve, Mike Perkins acknowledges the area isn't pristine.

Oil refineries and power transmission towers are within clear view of the preserve acreage. A landfill built on Farmington Bay will be 60 feet tall when it closes in 20 years. Residential subdivisions directly abut the parkway, and more are on the way.

UDOT already has removed thousands of truckloads of debris from the preserve, which is under the Salt Lake City International Airport flight path. "There has been a lot of human activity here for a lot of years, so it's been degraded," says Perkins, an environmental scientist with HDR Engineering of Salt Lake City.

As he speaks, Sylvia Hartley, a UDOT engineer who is overseeing the agency's preserve lands, spots a ring-necked pheasant, a quail and a red-winged hawk. That prompts Lynn de Freitas, executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, to comment obliquely about the legal action that led to the new preserve land.

"It's taken us a long time to get to this point, a beginning," de Freitas says.

Her organization, along with the Sierra Club, Utahns for Better Transportation, Great Salt Lake Audubon, Future Moves Coalition and the Utah League of Women, filed the 2001 lawsuit that stopped construction, pending deeper environmental studies.

At one time, 80 percent of what has been set aside forever under the negotiated settlement was considered ripe for development. Instead, UDOT will manage the reserve in perpetuity while also improving the wetland and upland wildlife habitat.

Full throttle: Some preliminary earth-moving has begun since the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted its injunction against the project on Valentine's Day. The court order was the culmination of negotiations that began shortly after Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. took office last year and got the talks rolling.

The designs UDOT showed off at an open house Thursday were basically the skeleton of the road the agency hopes to open to motorists by fall 2008. Now the design team and engineers have to fill it in, figure out the cost of every last detail down to the drip irrigation head that waters a particular tree or clump of bunch grass.

Fred Doehring, UDOT project management engineer, says the tasks that must be completed between now and August, when the project is let out to bid, will take the kind of devotion members of the design team displayed when they compressed what would normally have been a three-year process into nine months.

One of Doehring's biggest surprises was engineers' willingness to step outside the traditional UDOT box.

"I was expecting we would have to convert people, but we didn't," he says. "I come from very strong design background, which generally means you design nice straight, linear highways that are safe. I found that yes, we can still meet all our safety needs while also considering aesthetics."

If Doehring was the project's sergeant, as one participant suggested, Thomas was the respected team captain. Relatively new to UDOT, it was Thomas' idea to inject as much art as possible into the parkway.

Two hundred people, including about 150 consultants from local and outside firms, have helped design the road. Their performance has been remarkable, Thomas says.

"It was beyond professional commitment. They got personally involved and interested," he says. "As a nation, we've built other roadways and called them parkways. But we think this is probably the most studied parkway in the last several decades."