The creative use of space, objects and time is a hallmark of Christo, who passed away on May 31, 2020. Together with his partner Jean-Claude, he evolved the idea of wrapping objects, buildings, and landscapes, transforming them into an art form. Our author Wolfram Höfer, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, reflects on his personal encounters with Christo’s art. A personal farewell.
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For me, as a landscape architect, Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s art is important because it forced the viewer to see places and landforms differently – and so to discover new qualities. My first personal encounter with their work was the “Wrapped Reichstag” in Berlin in 1995. I had just graduated from college and was working as a landscape planner. Their “Project for Berlin” became my summer event. Christo and Jeanne-Claude transformed the not very architecturally exciting Reichstag building (Wilhelm II-style: over-decorated, clumsy, fat, loaded with a lot of bad German history) into an aesthetically exciting object and created a completely new space. It was fascinating to see how thousands of people were enjoying it every day: examining, discussing, arguing. To me, Christo’s art often shows a witty (and wise) sense of humor that seemed to shine through from under the veil of cloth.
“The perception of the building in Berlin’s urban space has been sustainably changed by Christo”
Today, the “Wrapped Reichstag” is history and the building again serves its original purpose as Germany’s parliament. But since then, the perception of the building in Berlin’s urban space has been sustainably changed by Christo. His veiling was a revelation for many, taking away part of the building’s historic encumbrance and creating unforgettable images.
In 1999 and in 2013 I had the opportunity to see Christo’s installations at the Gasometer in Oberhausen. During both projects, his playful dealing with space and scale were remarkable and memorable. The 1999 “Wall of Oil Barrels” and the 2013 “Big Air Package” delivered a sublime perception of three-dimensional space inside this former industrial building. Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s installation made it possible to experience what “absolutely great” really feels like. As a footnote – these two projects were their only land-art installations inside an exhibition venue. On all other occasions the artist couple only used exhibition spaces to present objects from the preparation of their projects – these objects pointed at the final ‘product’, but did not physically show it.
“I was blown away by the beauty and spatial experience.”
In 2005, when I walked the “Gates” project in New York City’s Central Park, I just loved their work (as before in Berlin and Oberhausen). I was flirting with the idea of moving to the U.S. and was blown away by the beauty and spatial experience moving through their perfectly placed orange gates and the shiny orange fabric. The paths they chose for the “Gates” modeled a landscape out of Central Park in wintery light that was beautifully sublime. It created a joyful walking experience and cast Central Park in a completely different light. Today, another layer of appreciation adds to my relationship to Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s oeuvre. After 15 years of working in the tristate area surrounding New York City (NYC), I now see a new dimension of their art: making projects become reality. Bureaucracy is a global phenomenon, but in this respect as in many others, NYC is exceptional: political minefields and trench warfare render decision making a debilitatingly slow snail-paced race. Only a stellar mix of stamina, patience, wit, and stubbornness could bring the city administration and Central Park Conservancy (who were extremely critical of any installation because they feared for damage to the park due to the bracings for the gates) to one table that lead to the installation – eventually.
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In the aftermath, “The Gates” was an amazing success for Central Park. No damage was done to anything in the park, amazing public relations were generated worldwide, plus a generous donation to the Park Administration by Christo and Jeanne-Claude made the decision to allow this exception a wise move. It took Christo and Jeanne-Claude 25 years to implement “The Gates” – but this kind of stamina was an essential part of their artistic work. Without their endurance all their ideas would have remained just nice dreams.
“He sees himself as an educated Marxist who knows how to use the capitalist system for his art.”
Finally: Who has paid for all this? Christo and Jeanne-Claude! Through the sale of posters and other merchandise related to their studies for the different projects, they were able to finance their projects without any public or private support from third parties. From Jeanne-Claude’s perspective, their projects became particularly powerful because they were available to everyone, but only temporary and could not be purchased or owned. The New York Times wrote, quoting Christo, that he sees himself as an educated Marxist who knows how to use the capitalist system for his art.
“Certain components of landscape architecture can take inspiration from Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s work”
Landscape architecture is no ‘free art’, but certain components of landscape architecture can take inspiration from Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s work. Their design always referred to a spatial context; interventions were never only self-reflecting – they always turned into a new meaning for each space that went beyond the transient physical art itself.
Today, when I remember the artworks of Christo and Jeanne-Claude that I personally had the opportunity to witness and experience, it seems to me that they both look at the viewer through their art – with a twinkle in their eyes – saying: Enjoy life and allow yourself to see things differently! Discover the new in the seemingly well-known!
Cities are forever haunted by the ghosts of unrealised projects, as demonstrated by NeoMam’s recent rendering of an unrealised entry for the 1858 competition to design New York’s Central Park.
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We tend not to see the built environment as a product of chance. But what eventually comes to fill a space could just as easily have been something completely different. Designs go through countless revisions. Brilliant proposals are rejected for arbitrary reasons. The endlessly minute modifications people make after a design is completed are subject to forces way outside the control of anyone involved in the initial development.
NeoMam’s recent rendering of an unrealised entry for the 1858 competition to design New York’s Central Park reminds us that even the most seemingly timeless and treasured parts of the urban landscape were the subject of decisions that could have easily gone an entirely different way. Designed by park engineer John J. Rink, the entry proposes having trees arranged in several symmetrical patterns, with a series of concentric circles located on the park’s northside standing out most prominently. Unlike the Central Park that we know now, which was designed by F. L. Olmsted and C. Vaux, Rink’s design is much neater and more manicured than the successful design and much more akin to the French jardin. Although Rink’s was the only unsuccessful proposal whose plans still survive today, there were 32 entries to the competition in total. That’s 32 variations of probably the most well-known park in the world.
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Looking at a Ghost
There’s something rather uncanny about the rendering of Rink’s design. It’s almost like looking at a ghost, haunting the park and the city we’re so familiar with.
Sticking with New York, at around the same period, two curious unrealised designs for public infrastructure also strike a ghostly tone. Dr Rufus Henry Gilbert’s 1880 design for a pneumatic elevated railway would have had passengers transported through a pair of “atmospheric tubes” suspended by a succession of gothic-style wrought iron arches. Thanks to the Wall Street Panic of 1873, the proposal didn’t leave the drawing board.
In general, pneumatic railways have failed to catch on, despite still being entertained to this day as a viable form of mass transit – something seen most recently in the ridicule that followed Elon Musk’s “Hyperloop”. Because of this long history of failure, Gilbert’s design has an odd quality of being both retro and futuristic, and therefore quite tragic and even unsettling, since it upsets our idea of historical time as something linear and inevitable.
Manhattan Nocturne
The second design is Raymond Hood’s 1925 proposal to build a series of “apartment bridges” linking Manhattan Island with the mainland. Intended to ease congestion in the city and provide housing with spectacular waterfront views, the astonishing drawings he made for this plan are works of art in their own right. Recalling James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s nocturnes, Hood rendered the structure all in black, with the imposing apartment bridge dwarfing the cars it carries across the river and the boats beneath. It feels like we’re gazing upon a dream. Then again, that’s always what we’re doing when we look at a plan for something that doesn’t exist in reality.
As Darran Anderson points out in a 2015 article for Dezeen, these unrealised plans can prepare the ground for future projects, and these new projects can in turn lend legitimacy to the original failure. More than that, though, these unrealised plans give the lie to that all-too-common mantra of the market-driven urban economy “there is no alternative”. Instead, we see that the city contains within it an infinite array of alternate unrealised futures. Nothing that exists now was inevitable. Anything that went unrealised still exists as a latent potential, ready to be resurrected.
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For the original Source of the Renderings click here.
Bigger, more beautiful, more expensive: The Museum of Modern Art in New York was reopened after four months of renovation work and featuring the new “David Geffen Wing” worth 450 million.
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The wing is named after the Californian music billionaire, who donated 100 million dollars for the reconstruction (David Rockefeller, whose mother Abby Aldrich founded the museum 90 years ago, contributed 200 million dollars). Constructed on the western side of the building on West 53rd Street, the wing extends to the basements of a high-rise apartment building by Jean Nouvel that was built at the same time. The site of the American Folk Art Museum had to give way to it – very much to the annoyance of the preservationists. This is no surprise for a museum connected to the Who’s Who of New York’s real-estate industry (the American Folk Art Museum itself is nowadays located at Columbus Circle).
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The reconstruction increases the exhibition surface of one of the world’s biggest art museums by one third, about 5,000 square kilometres. The MoMA now comprises more than 60 galleries on six floors, a continuous sequence of rooms. The architects are Diller Scofidio + Renfro, known for the “Highline” and the Lincoln Center renovation, along with global design and architecture firm Gensler.
Almost like an Apple store?
Not everyone is completely thrilled. Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, described the construction as intelligent and precise, almost like an Apple store, yet “slightly soulless”. The MoMA would have turned the block into a canyon of steel and glass, bringing to mind the “headquarters of Darth Vader’s hedge fund”. Only the façade is dark, though. On the inside, the new construction is flooded with light; the galleries, a series of bright rooms grouped around the lobby, provide views of the sculpture garden. The lobby has been expanded as well; visitors no longer enter the museum through a dark corridor, but through a bright hall. Moreover, a display window has been fitted, allowing passers-by to catch a glimpse of the exhibits. There’s also a terrace restaurant on the sixth floor.
A continuous rotation
The extension was vital, since the museum has been overcrowded with three million visitors a year. Moreover, it enables a new way of presenting the art exhibits. From now on, the galleries are going to be mixed up every six months and supplemented by existing properties as well as new acquisitions; a continuous rotation. The MoMA incorporates an enormous collection of 140,000 art objects, most of which have been tucked away in the archive so far. The rotation will involve a great deal of work by the curators, in addition to good orientation skills by the visitors.
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Strengthen the presence of artists
As in the past, architecture continues to be one of MoMA’s key areas. It is present through all forms of media and expression, from paintings to drawings, sculptures, installations, infinite video loops, film excerpts and sound elements. The exhibits include pieces from the Frank Lloyd Wright collection, for instance, such as a model of the Guggenheim Museum, situated at Central Park. Another gallery showcases Marcel Duchamp. One room is dedicated to the 1930s modernism, with posters from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, film excerpts from “Berlin – Symphony of a Metropolis”, the outline of Mies van der Rohe’s envisaged tower at the Berlin Friedrichstraße, as well as drawings by El Lissitzky and city models by Le Corbusier. Moreover, it includes an exemplar of the Frankfurt kitchen by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. The museum aims to strengthen the presence of artists. While the larger part of the new MoMA consists of existing properties, it also features some new acquisitions, such as a room-high sculpture by artist Sheila Hicks.
The museum now also merges art across time periods and continents. Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” was placed in contrast to the writhing clay pots by George Ohr from Mississippi, the “Mad Potter of Biloxi”. And Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is now positioned next to a painting of the American artist Faith Ringgold, depicting the race riots in New York’s Harlem district in the 1960s.
Not the last one
Originally, Elizabeth Diller was supposed to build the new MoMA, but the museum did not favour her large-size concept. The extension by Diller Scofidio + Renfro hasn’t been the first one since its foundation in 1939, when the building was only six storeys tall and clad in marble. Through several phases, the museum has taken up almost the entire block in Manhattan, including a residential tower for affluent New Yorkers. Philip Johnson built here in the sixties, then Cesar Pelli. The last rebuilding was carried out in 2004 by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. Presumably, this reconstruction won’t be the last one either.
Donald Trump’s rise in 1970s New York tells us much about the current urban moment we are still living through.
Donald Trump first entered the public consciousness with the construction of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, a lavish $70m construction which replaced the derelict Commodore Hotel opposite New York’s Grand Central Station. Using his position as president of his father’s company, he went on to make a name in 1970s New York through a series of other extravagant real estate developments.
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This was a particularly opportune moment to be pursuing these kinds of projects since at that time New York City was undergoing a major shift in its urban economy, away from public housing and public works and towards private luxury development.
Since we are still very much living with its consequences, it’s well worth revisiting the history which led to this important moment in the history of modern cities.
White Flight
In 1975, New York was close to bankruptcy, due to spiralling debts and a decades-long decline in its tax base. This decline can itself be traced back to the US federal government’s housing policy in the decades following the Second World War, in which they encouraged home ownership in the rapidly expanding suburbs by offering to underwrite the loans made by mortgage companies.
By stimulating not just the housing market but also the growing markets for cars and household goods, this policy was instrumental in sparking the post-war economic boom (seen not just in the US but across the West). But in the US, it had the effect of emptying out the inner cities and also heavily discriminated in favour of the white middle class and against African Americans.
Good Intentions, Bad Policy
New York City was hit especially hard, such that by the mid-1970s, the city’s municipal government was increasingly reliant on borrowing in order to cover its budget shortfalls. While it was born out of good intentions, this was bad policy on the municipality’s part, since governments should really only borrow for capital expenditure (i.e. investment in fixed assets like infrastructure) rather than to cover operating expenditure (i.e. wages, rents etc.).
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Eventually, the banks began to worry that the municipal government might not be able to meet its debt repayments. So, at the beginning of 1975, on a day when they were expected to buy a new issue of bonds, the bank’s representatives simply didn’t turn up. It was a remarkable demonstration of power.
Throughout the rest of the year, the situation worsened until the city was forced to appeal to the federal government for a bailout. President Ford initially said he would veto any bailout of the city, in a speech sparked the famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”. However, for fear that it might cause a domino effect, he eventually relented.
The biggest tax break in history
New York was saved from bankruptcy, but it had turned a corner. Rattled by their encounter with the abyss, the municipal government allowed the creation of a panel occupied almost entirely by representatives of the banks, who set about imposing sweeping austerity measures on the city, including cuts to public sector employees and welfare.
This was the context of Donald Trump’s rise to fame. He was one of the first people to negotiate large tax breaks from a desperate city government, which he used to build luxury housing. This was what was so remarkable about the Grand Hyatt Hotel project. Here, he negotiated the biggest tax break in history, an exemption of property over 40 years which would eventually amount to $160m.
Meanwhile, those same banks saw an opportunity themselves, and started lending him money to build. Without spending a penny, Trump began to transform New York into a city for the rich.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Sarah Schulman’s book The Gentrification of the Mind is about the AIDS epidemic and the huge, criminally forgotten impact it had on New York’s cultural life and its queer scene. Published in 2011, it remains a crucial text for understanding the broader mechanisms enabling the process of gentrification.
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Schulman begins the book by naming the two most gentrified cities in the US: New York and San Francisco. She then names the most gentrified neighbourhoods in Manhattan: East Village, West Village, Lower Eastside, Harlem, and Chelsea and compares them to the findings of a report on the social impact of AIDS, published in 1993 by the National Research Council, which recorded that Manhattan’s highest rates of infection were also in Chelsea (1,802 per 100,000), Lower Eastside East Village (1,434 per 100,000), Greenwich Village (1,175 per 100,000), and Harlem (722 per 100,000), as compared, for example, to the less gentrified Upper Eastside which had 597 deaths per 100,000.
In these areas, AIDS-related deaths had the effect of drastically increasing the turnover of apartments. They also allowed landlords to side-step the limits imposed by rent controls, since the partner of the deceased was not legally entitled to inherit the lease (which often also meant that they were forced to vacate shortly after their partner’s death).
“The Polish butcher was replaced by a suburban bar”
In their place came a predominantly white, middle class cohort, raised in the suburbs and looking for a bit of edge, yet bringing their own tastes with them and gradually forcing out the diverse businesses these neighbourhoods already had to offer: “The corner bodega that sold tamarind, plantain, and yucca was replaced by an upscale deli that sells Fiji Water, the emblematic yuppie product. Habib’s falafel stand, where he knew everyone on the block and put extra food on your plate when you were broke—he was replaced by a “Mexican” restaurant run by an NYU MBA who never puts extra food on your plate. An Asian fish store was replaced by an upscale restaurant. The Polish butcher was replaced by a suburban bar.”
For the most part, we understand gentrification as an urban or economic process. It is that, to be sure, but Schulman identifies some other important qualities. “Spiritually,” Schulman writes, “gentrification is removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity—the familiar interaction of different kinds of people creating ideas together. Urbanity is what makes cities great.”
“Gentrification works much more effectively if it can exploit death”
She also sees this process of homogenisation as something which can happen just as much to the artistic process as it can to a specific inner-city neighbourhood. “There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like.” Schulman’s book also reminds us that, while gentrification may often work by gradually pricing people out, it works much more effectively if it can exploit death. People who are priced out can fight back in a way that the dying cannot and they aren’t so easily forgotten as those who have died from a heavily stigmatised illness.
The act of forgetting factors heavily in Schulman’s book. One moment that sticks out is when she recalls almost forgetting someone she knew, Mark Fotopoulos, until he kept appearing in footage she was reviewing for United in Anger, a documentary on the history of AIDS activist organisation ACT UP. Fotopoulos was always standing alone at demonstrations with a placard that read “Living with AIDS 2 Years and 3 Months, no thanks to you Mr. Reagan” with the date updating every month. She didn’t immediately realise, but he stops appearing in later footage: “Maybe one day he just didn’t feel well enough to come out with his sign, and he stopped coming altogether, and then he died”. He had become an apparition. In another moment, she recalls spotting a dumpster filled with a lifetime’s collection of playbills, a sign that “another gay men had died of Aids, his belongings dumped in the gutter”.
The Gentrification of the Mind is a book intended to fight this process of erasure, which is, after all, one of the most important tools in the gentrifier’s arsenal. Gentrification only works if we do not have to reckon with its underlying violence and indecency.
Once upon a time, every metropolis had some kind of ambitious development proposal – the outrageous kind that makes everybody feel relieved that it wasn’t realized. Paris had its Plan Voisin by Le Corbusier, Berlin its nightmare vision of Germania and New York its almost forgotten “Manhattan Airport”. If the centrally located Airport had been built in 1946, New York and especially Manhattan would have a totally different appearance today. The centrepiece would be a monstrous series of buildings with a gigantic footprint of four million square meters and a height of 70 meters. The actual airfield was supposed to be a continuous platform spanning the rooftops of an entire ensemble of buildings.
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Hell’s Kitchen, Upper West Side – Disappeared
The idea behind the Manhattan Airport project was to cut commuting time to zero. Travelers using La Guardia or Newark airports had to drive for 45 minutes to an hour to reach Midtown Manhattan. But the man behind the project, flamboyant real estate tycoon William Zeckendorf, had to deal with a small, but explosive detail first: 144 densely built blocks had to be demolished in order to build the project. Hell’s Kitchen and big parts of the Upper West side would have been erased from existence. An area spanning 24th to 71st street and reaching from Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River, roughly as big as Central Park, would have been covered by the enormous megastructure. Right next to the platform with its rooftop airfield, buildings and structures were planned for industrial purposes, as terminals for buses and trucks, for commercial and freight railroad lines and indoor highways. Another remarkable feature would have been giant boathouses for transatlantic ocean liners, facing the Hudson River.
Urban Development at Its Worst
The implementation of the airport plan would have had serious, life-changing consequences for Manhattan: In addition to an immense degree of demolition work, which would have changed the appearance of the West Side forever, the access to the Hudson River would have been blocked by the 70-meter-buildings like a continuous, massive wall. Also, additional Highways would have had to be built, literally cutting the island into pieces. Finally, there was another reason to be glad the project was never realized: Only a decade later the jet age began. The new planes would have been too loud for the area and the dimensions of the airfield would have been too small for a modern airport.
New York’s Times Square got another attraction: The “XXX Times Square with Love”. The three X-shaped sculptures have nothing to do with the shady past of the famous place. They have the function of relaxing loungers. The designers from J. Mayer H Architects were inspired by the shape of the crossroads where the Broadway crosses 7th Avenue.
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A Progress For Pedestrians
During the last years, Times Square has undergone a positive development. After it turned slowly from a red-light district with high crime rates into a touristic shopping and theatre district, the place can once again build on its glorious past. A milestone was the conversion from one of New York’s busiest crossings into a pedestrian zone in 2009, making the world-renowned crossroads finally a pleasant stay for visitors. Since then, many festivals and cultural events have taken place. Also, from time to time, Times Square functions as an exhibition place for sculptures.
More Than An Objet D’art
One of the art projects that can now be admired is the “XXX Times Square with Love”. The work of the Berlin design office J. Mayer H consists of three X-shaped loungers where visitors can relax. Each lounger can accommodate up to four people, while the legs of the “X” are slightly bevelled. Thanks to this shape, people face and can communicate with each other or just enjoy the stunning views. The name of the sculptures refers to the digital age, where greeting messages are exchanged via social media. In fact, the bright pink loungers can be quickly recognized on webcams and photographs: on average, they’re posted around 17,000 times per day on Instagram.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new, completely redesigned David H. Koch Plaza recently opened to the public, after a major two-year reconstruction effort. The massive outdoor space – which runs along Fifth Avenue for four city blocks – features new fountains, paving, lighting, and trees leading to the Museum’s entrances from north and south, and seating areas for visitors. Landscape architecture firm OLIN led the design to prioritize the pedestrian experience and create a welcoming urban destination. The plaza is named for David H. Koch, a Museum Trustee, who contributed the entire $65 million cost of the project.
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The new plaza offers a contemporary yet contextual response to the museum’s iconic façade, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and Richard Howland Hunt in 1896, with later wings by McKim, Mead and White. The grand stairs, a beloved New York City landmark, designed by Roche Dinkeloo and Associates in 1968, were preserved. Two new fountains have replaced the former deteriorating ones and are positioned closer to the Museum’s front steps, improving access to the street-level public entrances at 81st and 83rd Streets. The plaza also features tree allées and bosques, more than doubling the former tree population and weaving in the verdancy of nearby Central Park. Numerous permanent and temporary seating areas are positioned around the plaza, some featuring parasols for shade. Seasonal plantings have been added along the base of the building to provide color and visual interest throughout the year. An intricate and energy efficient lighting palette highlights the beauty of the museum and dynamism of the fountains, and allows visitors to enjoy the plaza well into the evening hours.
Landscape
At the far north and south ends of the plaza, where the architecture steps forward toward the street, two allées of large Little Leaf Linden trees have been planted, continuing the shaded route along the Central Park wall and aligned to the rhythm of the windows along the Museum’s façade facing Fifth Avenue. As they grow, the trees will be pruned in the form of two aerial hedges, similar to the trees at the Palais Royal in Paris. The presence of the trees is intended to create a pleasant experience along the street. Hedging the row of trees reinforces the central plaza’s volume and ensures the trees do not detract from the monumentality of the Museum’s façade.
Within the central plaza, pairs of bosques of London Plane trees have been planted, flanking the 81st and 83rd Street entrances. Planted on a square grid turned at a 45-degree angle to the street, the lines of these tree trunks will guide pedestrians toward the doorways. Beneath the bosques, shaded seating is provided, using lightweight movable chairs that allow users to arrange them as they please. These casual seating areas offer clear views of the plantings and water features of the plaza, with the activity of Fifth Avenue in the background. Additional benches adjacent to the allées of trees provide further options for seating with shade provided by a series of cantilevered parasols.
Fountains
The new granite fountains, designed by Fluidity Design Consultants, will be operational year-round, bracketing the grand stairs to create an energized connection between people sitting on the steps and those at the fountains, while punctuating the long plaza with attractive water elements. Each fountain is a quiet square form inset with a circle that provides seating on long stone benches along the north and south edges of the pools. Evenly spaced nozzles, mounted around the edge of the circular basin, orient glassy streams toward the center of the feature. The streams will be individually size-controlled to display geometrical figures and innovative, self-generating motion patterns conceived to connect with the Museum’s historic architecture and the City’s contemporary spirit. In winter, the water will be warmed by recycled steam for year-round use.
Lighting
The evening ambiance of the Museum plaza will be enhanced by the hierarchy of light on the landscape, water features, grand stairs, and façade. The previous lighting, which illuminated the façade unevenly by light poles across the street from the building, has been removed. The new elements, designed by the lighting design practice L’Observatoire International, are mounted on the Museum’s façade and the plaza itself. This treats the building like a work of art, highlighting the shape and form of its cornices, molding, decorative statues, and pillars.
Environmental Sustainability
The plaza design attempts to reconcile the physical need for a significant area of paved plaza with the desire to employ sustainable strategies regarding stormwater management and the urban heat island effect, two goals that are often at odds with each other. To accomplish this, the trees and parasols that have been installed significantly increase the square footage of shade in the plaza, thereby reducing the surface temperature of the paving by as much as 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Additionally, a suspended paving system allows for extensive subsurface tree pits that now collect and utilize onsite stormwater that would otherwise have drained into the City’s sewer system. Excess stormwater that is not captured by the subsurface tree pits or the ornamental planting areas will be collected and directed into underground detention areas that hold and slowly release water into the City’s stormwater system. This gives significant relief to the extreme demand put on the City’s aging system.
David H. Koch Plaza at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York, USA
Landscape architects: OLIN
Consultants:
Fluidity Design Consultants – water feature design
L’Observatoire International – lighting design
Spatial Affairs Bureau (formerly Rick Mather USA) – parasols, stone benches, new guard booths
Gorton & Associates – project and cost management
Sam Schwartz Engineering – vehicular and pedestrian traffic flow plan
Kohler Ronan – MEP, fire protection engineering
WJE Engineers & Architects, P.C. – building façade consulting
Langan Engineering and Environmental Services – civil, geotech, traffic, surveying
AKRF – environmental consulting
Jacobs | Doland – food service operations
Robert Silman Associates, Inc. – structural engineer
Northern Designs – irrigation
Milrose Consultants Inc. – code consultant, permitting
Urban Arborists – arborist
Urban Trees & Soils – soils consulting
Entro – signage design
RCDolner – general contractor
Text credit: OLIN / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The comprehensive climate change adaptation and community development project Living Breakwaters by Scape / Landscape Architecture has been selected as the winner of the 2014 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, “socially responsible design’s highest award”. The project by the New York based landscape architects is also one of the Rebuild by Design winners and was published in Topos 87 on “Coastal Strategies”.
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“Living Breakwaters is about dissipating and working with natural energy rather than fighting it. It is on the one hand an engineering and infrastructure-related intervention, but it also has a unique biological function as well. The project team understand that you cannot keep back coastal flooding in the context of climate change, but what you can do is ameliorate the force and impact of 100 and 500 year storm surges to diminish the damage through ecological interventions, while simultaneously catalyzing dialog to nurture future stewards of the built environment,” said Bill Browning of Terrapin Bright Green, a 2014 senior advisor and jury member.
The Living Breakwaters project integrates components ranging from ecologically engineered “Oyster-tecture,” to transformational education around coastal resiliency and the restoration of livelihoods traditional to the community of Tottenville in Staten Island, while also spurring systemic change in regulatory pathways at the State level.
Kate Orff of Scape said, “We are so honored to be the 2014 Fuller Challenge recipient – Fuller was optimistic about the future of humanity and deeply believed in cooperation as the way forward. As climate change impacts threaten shoreline populations, Living Breakwaters hopefully represents a paradigm shift in how we collectively address climate risks, by focusing on regenerating waterfront communities and social systems, and enhancing threatened ecosystems.”
Orff will accept the prestigious Fuller Challenge prize and a $100,000 cash award on behalf of the Scape team at a celebration in New York on 20 November. The project was chosen from seven finalists.
