Brooklyn Bridge Park is not just a civic miracle—I believe it’s one of the great urban parks of the 21st century. The space is a mere 85 acres (Central Park is about 10 times as large), but it contains a multitude of activities, moods, terrains, even ecosystems, framed by some of the most stunning views imaginable: New York Harbor, birthplace of the great metropolis. Every time I take the train out to Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge, I look down at the park, the carousel, the shimmering harbor, people strolling beneath Roebling’s enduring masterpiece, and think: How on earth could anyone have been opposed to all this? But, indeed, there were naysayers and obstacles along the way. Park building, especially in New York, is often measured in decades. The path from abandoned warehouses to waterfront park took many years. Landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), were around for much of that journey.
The park was completed in several phases, with the final one occurring in December To mark that achievement, MVVA has just released a glorious doorstop of a book, Brooklyn Bridge Park (Monacelli). Although there are se
Brooklyn Bridge Park by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
“When we were planning Brooklyn Bridge Park [BBP], people kept telling us how much they wanted to be able to touch the water,” says BBP’s designer, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, recalling the hundreds of community meetings he attended in the making of this park. Simple as that request may seem, it reflects the complicated saga of our cities and their rivers — and, specifically, the tale of this narrow, irregular mile-long stretch of waterfront in Brooklyn, New York, and its barriers to neighborhood enjoyment.
Though they live surrounded by water, most New Yorkers have never touched the city’s East or Hudson Rivers. And while both rivers are tidal estuaries, their extensively bulwarked banks scarcely register such ephemeral events as rising and falling tides.
Like many American cities, New York long severed much of daily life, particularly leisure activity, from direct engagement with its waterways. Visitors to urban riverside parks have historically been sequestered in scenic overlooks or railed-in promenades. And with good reason: Through the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, harbors developed in
Designing a Garden: Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Michael Van Valkenburgh is the founder of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) and formerly the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Based in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, his firm is widely acknowledged as a leader in the discipline of landscape architecture. MVVA's design for Brooklyn Bridge Park earned the firm the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Prize, given each year to the creator of a work of art that best captures the spirit and energy of New York City. Other notable projects include Teardrop Park in New York, waterfront parks in Toronto, Dallas, Tulsa, and Detroit, new gardens at the Menil Collection in Houston, and the landscape surrounding the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago's Jackson Park.
Instilling a poetics of place is a goal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), the famous landscape design firm that has created successful public spaces in some of the country’s most challenging urban sites. In these locations, nature offers not so much an escape from city living as a teasing dialogue with built structures. The whole experience is aimed, as critic Paul Goldberger notes, to “make you see everything, city and nature alike, with a striking intensity.”
Richly illustrated and handsomely designed, this is the first publication to explore a wide range of MVVA’s projects, focusing on the firm’s trend toward sites requiring complex technological solutions. Leading critics and historians look at twelve projects, dating from to the present, and each posing a challenge—such as contamination, isolation, and lengthy public approval proceedings. They explore the process through which the firm researches such issues and how solutions are embedded in the final aesthetics and spatial structure of the sites.
Yale University Press
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