Being a kid—or at least a playground designer—was a lot more fun in the 1970s, before the advent of telephone-book-thick ASTM standards, not to mention things like critical fall heights, head-entrapment guidelines, and the virtual outlawing of sand. But vestiges of that freewheeling age can be found in Central Park, where the spirit of adventure thrives thanks to restorations this summer of two pioneering playgrounds.
Image credit: Courtesy Central Park Conservancy
Once mocked as "Shanghai on the Hudson"—a back-office Wall Street annex, all but devoid of urban life—downtown Jersey City has become an unlikely showcase of smart growth, thanks in part to a $2 billion light-rail line that has unlocked a wave of new development, not to mention a major dose of Andres Duany's New Urbanist sensibility. Seaside on the Morris Canal?
Image credit: Victoria Monjo
To get to Ragnar Kjartansson’s countryside studio, I
flew to Reykjavík, drove to a scarcely inhabited fjord called
Borgarfjörður an hour north of the city, splashed across a tidal
waterway in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and pulled up to a bluff
overlooking the glacial river Hvítá. There, in a small cottage, I found
the artist fixing a proper Icelandic repast of dried haddock and
headcheese and bottles of Egils Gull beer. Little did I know what the prodigy of Icelandic performance art had in store for me.
Image credit: Wolfgang Träger
Thanks to New York City's deadening zoning rules, public waterfronts have often been dullsville: unbending bulkheads, forbidding railings, and nary a spot to quaff a beer. A new proposal now under review by city officials would, for the first time in 15 years, revamp the way developer-built public waterfront spaces are designed, owned, and managed. The Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront (above) has been something of a test case for the city's new rules, and while the result has been generally deemed a great leap forward, the zoning could still take a few tweaks to get us beyond high-and-dry.
Image credit: Courtesy FXFowle
Some of my colleagues at The Architect's Newspaper have written a lovely ode to the old New Deal, one sadly not destined to be reprised in the Obama administration's first round of stimulus spending. Use it or lose it, indeed.
Image credit: Jet Lowe/Courtesy Library of Congress
In Orange County, the car-centric heart of the American dream, New York
landscape architect Ken Smith is creating a complex, urban-scale public space that promotes ecological and social sustainability. Orchards? Check. Urban farms? Yes. Botanic gardens, canine frisbee competitions, and a gigantic helium balloon? All in. This ambitious Central Park for the 21st century even comes with its own custom-carved, two-mile-long canyon. Take that, Olmsted.
Image credit: Great Park Design Studio
"For everybody, being in New York's streets can be a way of being at home. Can we count on our city planners to be there?" So asks Marshall Berman in The New York 2030 Notebook, a new collection of rants, raves, reflections, and ruminations on New York's future from a rousing confederation of urbanists, thinkers, and critics. Edited by Jeff Byles and Olympia Kazi and published by the Institute for Urban Design, the notebook takes up the gauntlet thrown down by New York's forward-focused PlaNYC 2030. Will the Gotham of tomorrow spring from "voodoo demographics" and a misguided agenda of growth? Will it offer environmental and economic equity? Will it have bike racks, for god's sake? Check out constructively zinger-filled essays from Richard Sennett, Winka Dubbeldam, James Wines, Miquela Craytor, Klaus Jacob, Michael Sorkin, and many more. As the crypto-urbanologist Damon Rich aptly writes, the last great master plan of New York (circa 1969) reads "like a science fiction novel about earth written by aliens." Beam us up, Mayor Bloomberg. But first, boldly go buy this book!
When the Swedish furniture company Ikea took over the 22-acre Todd Shipyard property along Brooklyn’s Erie Basin, it inherited piles of ropes, winches, a forgotten shipyard log, and a hefty chunk of Red Hook history. Six years later, that swath of salutary grit has been reborn as Erie Basin Park, a nearly mile-long stretch of newly accessible public waterfront. Built and paid for by Ikea, the park is both a tribute and a tombstone to the industrial past—and a surprisingly optimistic statement about Brooklyn’s future.
Image credit: Colin Cooke
Designed by Tadao Ando, Stone Hill Center isn’t your typical new museum
building. It sits up a winding footpath amid enveloping stands of birch, beech, and
sugar maples. When you reach this mountain redoubt—the latest addition
to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown,
Massachusetts—you’ll find no soaring
atrium, no signature reflecting pool. What you will find is a
lavishly appointed, $25 million, art-sudsing laundromat.
Image credit: Richard Pare/Courtesy Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
The Copenhagen-born artist Olafur Eliasson creates complex optical
effects with the simplest of means: light, reflection, and our passage
through space. In the exhibition Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, on
view at MoMA and P.S.1 through June 30, three large-scale installations
blur the boundaries between art and architecture, film and design.
Room-sized color fields create strange, new social spaces; chromatic
events turn light into landscape. In Eliasson's often surreal spaces, spectrum is structure.
Image credit: Matthew Septimus/Courtesy MoMA and P.S.1
