A meme self-organized itself in my bookmarks recently, clustering together internet detritus around the subject of city lights.
Included is a satellite image, published on NASA's Earth Observatory, of North America and its constellations of urban brightnesses at night. It's a classic image that most have probably seen before in many iterations, but this particular one received more than the usual attention because of the large, luminous smudge in North Dakota. Sprawled out over an area equal to, if not larger than, Chicago's but over one of the least-densely populated parts of the country, it's the “home to the Bakken shale formation, a site where gas and oil production are booming.” While some, including me, have mistakenly thought the lights were all due to gas flaring, only “a few are evidence of gas flaring.” In fact, most are “associated with drilling equipment and temporary housing near drilling sites.”
There's also the image of New York in complete darkness save for the Milky Way in all its possible brilliance in the night sky. Several other cities are also rendered as their parallel world selves aglow with galactic light. Though Chicago isn't among them, images of the city's grid at night — the greatest built landscape in the world, in my opinion, second only to the Public Land Survey System and Central Park, and maybe Greater Los Angeles and Florida, but it's up there — pop in now and then in my Tumblr dashboard, most recently this amazing photo by Jim Richardson, part of a series that also includes this more panoramic view of the city irradiating some passing clouds. In other words, the Milky Way may be blotted out, but you can still go to the top of Sears Tower and watch the Andromeda Galaxy spread outover the prairie, half-swirling around the gravity well of the supercloverleaf in the West Loop, flinging motorists into and out of the city.
Before I come around to the photos decorating this post, I want to point out the photos taken from the International Space Station by its current commander, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield), who I recently started following on Twitter. Many of his orbital snaps got snagged by the meme, among them are of Kolkotta (“at night, definitely not the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' of legend”); Lisbon (“at night - black water, intricate spiderweb of surrounding towns”); Pyongyang; and Tehran with its “bright blue oval” bracelet.
Though he hasn't tweeted a photo of it yet, the residents of Hadfield's hometown of Sarnia in Ontario, lit up their city last Friday night, sprucing themselves up in a coordinated effort for their remote portrait, as it were. Light pollution has never been so tinge with romanticism and nostalgia: earthbound creatures sending out beacons out to spacefarers plying through “orbital darkness,” reminding them of home.
As opposite to the photo-poetics of Hadfield and Sarnia as one can possibly get, BBC News reported last week the “rise in the number of incidents in which handheld lasers are being used to distract airline pilots flying over London.” The statistics are quite astonishing: “in 2010 there were 145 reported incidents. In 2012 the number rose to 252.” Enraging astronomers, turning urban wildlife into insomniacs and aggravating the nature deficit syndrome of other city dwellers are one thing, but this part of the photonic smog spectrum causing airplane crashes is horrifyingly another.
To add to this meme, then, are these images of moonlight towers in Austin, Texas, photographed by Andy Mattern “at their most visible moment just after they turn on at dusk.” Quoting the project statement:
In 1895, the City of Austin acquired a novel street-lighting system from Detroit consisting of thirty-one 165-foot tower lights. Their cool glow and looming height earned them the popular moniker “Moonlight Towers.” In the 1930s, however, the towers were all but obsolete due to the advent of newer, brighter street lamps that were closer to the ground. Over the years for a variety of reasons including public safety and urban growth, more than half of the original towers have been removed.
Indeed, to also quote our go-to reference:
The structures were popular in the late 19th century in cities across the United States and Europe; they were most common in the 1880s-1890s. In some places they were used when standard street-lighting systems — using smaller, shorter, and more numerous lamps — were impractically expensive. Other times they were used in addition to existing gas street lighting. The towers were designed to illuminate areas often of several blocks at once. Arc lamps were the most common method of illumination, known for their exceptionally bright and harsh light.
Of the cities that once used to operate such a street-lighting system, Austin is “the only city in the world known to still” do so.
Since this is winter, the chronic period of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), I am reminded of, firstly, the Austrian town of Rattenberg and its unrealized plans to install heliostats that would have redirected sunlight to “a dozen 'hotspots' — areas not much bigger than a front yard scattered through the town, where people can gather and soak up rays.” Even more awesome, these Sunlight Towers also would have shone light “onto building facades to show daylight slowly turning to dusk.” In other words, buildings in the mountain's shadows are turned into public cinemas playing artificial weather spectacles everyday. (Except on cloudy days.)
Secondly, I'm reminded of Perpetual (Topical) SUNSHINE, a public installation by fabric | ch. A screen composed of 300 infrared light bulbs, this Tropical Tower allows winter sun bathers to soak in “an abstract and never-ending, planetary form of day and of summer, across longitudes and time zones.” You might be “out of sync both temporally and climactically” from the rest of the city, but perhaps this asynchronous urban space will light blast your mental health back into some semblance of normality.
Picking up the possible psychiatric benefits of these light towers, Moonlight Towers could be reinstalled in sun-deprived northern cities, turning downtown plazas, city parks, and the everyday sidewalks and alleyways into solar sanitariums for the depressives, the moody and the bipolars. Usually dead spaces in the winter, they'll teem with people in search of light therapy. In other words, Prozac Plazas. Not a deterrence against thieves and rapists but against fatal mood swings.
You won't be able to see the stars at night, but at least you're not going to kill yourself.
Here's your chance to have your work be included in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. The theme is “Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good.”
This year's curators, from the New York-based Institute for Urban Design, are looking for projects that are “[p]rovisional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY, unplanned, participatory, [or] open-source.” If at least one of those words describes your project, which additionally meets the following criteria, then consider submitting it.
1. project was initiated by the architect/artist/planner/landscape architect/hacker/activist/citizen (in other words, no one asked for it), OR was initiated by an alternative client, for example, a non-profit or a community group
2. project is publicly accessible and serves the common good
3. project improves a problematic condition (solves a problem by making a place more accessible, inclusive, sustainable, beautiful, etc.)
4. project is located in an urban context or tackles urban issues in the United States
5. project is participatory in nature, or open access, and serves an underserved or overlooked constituency
6. project is realized, deployed, in action or use (not theoretical)
7. project may be a physical intervention in an urban context, or an information, communication or digital project that improves people’s comprehension, navigation and access to a city
For Lift11, an urban installations festival being held this summer in Tallinn, Estonia, architects Siiri Vallner and Indrek Peil chose a “weathered and deformed” pier as the site for their temporary intervention.
There, they covered up some of the upturned concrete slabs with terrace boards on which one can sit and relax.
“This way,” as the project statement explains, “a derelict and crumbling object can be revived as part of the modern city space, opening up the seaside area of Tallinn for local people and for visitors.”
We would love to see the rough edges of the pier similarly boarded up in its entirety, though with some modulation on the surface like Vicente Guallart's microcoasts.
The 72 Hour Urban Action — a rapid, real-time architecture competition first organized last year in Bat-Yam, Israel — is coming to Melbourne on 25-30 July 2011. And applications are now being accepted!
100 international/national architects, designers, craftspeople and artists will race the clock to design and construct exciting new public space projects in just 72 hours in a real-time design challenge aimed at transforming Melbourne’s Docklands.
Applications for the competition are now open for individuals and groups, who will work in cross-disciplinary teams of 10 over three days and three nights to construct 10 exciting urban sites throughout the Docklands area from Monday, 25 July. Landscape Urbanism 72 Hour Urban Action Melbourne teams design, build, work and sleep on site, enriching the city with a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary experience. The competition offers an innovative platform that encourages rapid change through human initiative and creativity.
There's a two-tiered registration deadline. For the early bird, send your application by 2 May 2011. Everyone else has until 31 May 2011 to file theirs.
First prize is worth $20,000.00AUD.
Meanwhile, original event co-organizer Kerem Halbrecht is on a lecture tour of the United States this month presenting his organization's innovative platform for rapid urban change. He'll be speaking tonight at the Rebar Group in San Francisco, and tomorrow at Materials & Applications in Los Angeles.
Also, if you're still interested in which direction we think this event should go in the future, check out our idea for 72 Hour Urban Action in Venice. But you could just substitute Venice with any city with an architecture biennale (or without).
In Hong Kong, 120,000 to 200,000 women from the Philippines work as domestic helpers.
They are women that have sacrificed their personal life to give their own family, their children, a better life and education. They do not have private life. They suffer racism, and in many cases exploitation.
In their only day off, Sundays, they invade the downtown financial and commercial district, where they transform and occupy the streets, bridges, parks, plazas, shopping centre, the main commercial street, and also the emblematic building of the HSBC Hong Kong Bank. These women change the meaning of the commercial public space, where they transport their habits and traditions through leisure, rest, religion and culture. The luxury downtown city on Sundays becomes a domestic space where they meet, rest, eat, dance, play cards and pray.
They impose different codes into the space, building a new and unique human cartography. Their location is precise, constant.
We haven't yet seen this 1-hour documentary, but we're sure it will profoundly resonate with us, as our own immediate and extended family history abounds with stories of displacements. Ours is a transnational family whirled about the world by the diasporic forces of globalization.
Here's the trailer:
This testimony given to the filmmaker by Cecilia, a nurse who has been working in Hong Kong for 10 years, is typical.
I left my home in the Philippines because I needed the money to maintain my family. Working as a domestic helper I could pay the medical studies of my daughter, the education of my five brothers and sisters and the medical assistance of the cardio problems of my father.
But it is difficult to explain the bitterness and the great sacrifices of our lives. We all feel very lonely. We live far away from our husbands, from our sons and from all our loving friends. We do not have our own family life nor a social or cultural environment. It is an immense sacrifice that we do not deserve, even if we are poor. We also suffer discrimination and abuse in our work during the long daily hours.
We must have high school or university studies but we are treated as servants. In most cases we are more qualified than our Chinese employers.
We have only two weeks of holidays every two years of work. Only every two years we can visit our sons, our family. On Sundays we are happy when we invade the open spaces of Hong Kong and meet together to remember our identity and our culture. It is the only day in the week that we can do our personal things like shopping, go to the bank to send our salary to our families, go to Church and send boxes back home full of clothing, shoes, books, toys. This is our only physical contact with them.
We can laugh, sing, dance, eat and share between women our happiness, friendship and the solidarity that we miss in our domestic work. On Sunday we feel happy in foreign land. The parks and streets of the financial district of Hong Kong become Filipino territory, like the plazas of our little towns. The HSBC Bank is our cathedral and the cardboard casitas are our home.
But we are homeless women. At 8 or 9 in the evening we have to return to our job. We cannot sleep at the houses of our employers.
It's interesting to point out the HSBC Bank that Cecilia refers to above. Designed by Norman Foster, its public space was created with a specific urbanist purpose, as as financial and commercial center of the city. An area that otherwise might be empty and abandoned on weekends is instead turned into a bustling small town, somewhat autonomous from the city and with its own parallel economy of exchange and transactions.
Particularly in Rome, they congregate at Santa Pudenziana, the national church of the Philippines; the parking lots of Mussolini's EUR; Metro stations; and crowded post-war tower block apartments on the periphery. In these pop-up piazzas temporarily dotting the eternal Papal and Fascist grid, Filipinos seek relief from feelings of exclusion both from their host country and distant families, find solidarity with their fellow countrymen, and commit acts of resistance through fugitive visibility.
For this DIY pow-wow, organizers invite ten teams of architects, students, designers, artists and craftspeople who will be tasked “to respond to community needs and wants in relations to its public spaces.” Each team will be given up to $2,500 for materials, room and board, a central work space and a truck for transport. Engineers will also be on hand for construction and safety consultations. Starting on September 25, 2010, the launch date of the biennale, the teams will have three days and three nights to design and build their projects, some of which will be chosen to remain on site permanently. There's also a money prize worth $3,800 for the top project.
The deadline for registration is August 8, 2010. That's only a few days away, so if you're interested, you'll have to hustle.
Meanwhile, perhaps the entire Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 could be turned into a massive 72 Hour Urban Action festival. Instead of installing also-rans from the previous year's Art Biennale or taking the pickings from an august atelier's dusty model museums or asking Zaha Hadid to make another sofa, the architecture world's elite and bright young tykes are flown in, given a slightly plumper budget and then let loose in Venice and the surrounding salt marshes, with some perhaps venturing inland to the industrial landscapes of Veneto.
Just as at Bat-Yam, they have 3 days (could be longer) to design and build a project that meets a local social need or improves the urban experience. Biennale groupies can watch the teams while they work and then play around in/with the completed spatial interventions. They might even be asked to lend an extra pair of helping hands to hammer a few nails, to the horrors of biennale lawyers and insurance people. And in case you're wondering, the teams will be housed, fed and given working spaces at the Arsenale or in their country's pavilion.
Also like at Bat-Yam, some of the projects will be allowed to remain permanently. Every couple of years, new projects are plugged-in to the built environment, perhaps even to an earlier intervention. In this way, Venice and its environs are continually reshaped and renewed.
After countless biennales, we might have two Venices. There's La Serenissima, flooded and crumbling. Above it is the newer Venice built out of all the accumulated projects. This encrustation of ad hoc interventions is where the indigenous Venetians live and work, where the tourists buy their souvenirs after venturing down to the ancient city below.
Rather than a physical building, this mosque creates a place of worship in the spaces between buildings whose qibla is formed by skewering the urban grid to “forg[e] a forced perspective view in the direction of Mecca.”
Rather than an impervious (or quasi-impervious) block, it is “seamless with [the] streets, connected directly to the pulse of daily, and open to anyone and everyone at anytime.” At other times, it functions as an outdoor plaza.
“The inside of The Vanishing Mosque is its outside,” writes RUX. “Its community extends to the limits of the city at large, creating a sense of shared ownership, collective identity, and deep roots that connect spiritual life to modern urban living.”
Last Friday, Chicago celebrated the Blackhawks' first Stanley Cup victory in half a century with a ticker-tape parade in downtown ending with a rally at the foot of the Michigan Avenue bridge, kitty-corner from the recently completed Trump Tower. According to estimates by the city, 2 million people joined in the celebration, all jam packed in ridiculously small street footage.
A few things:
1) We're curious to find out the reasoning behind the decision to hold the rally in what is essentially a street intersection. The nearby Millennium Park is maybe too precious and dainty to survive the revelry, if it even could contain such a large crowd, but there's Grant Park. It's an incredibly rugged urban park, proving summer after summer that it can handle a stampede of wild festival goers. It's spacious, and there, more people might actually have seen or at least heard what was happening on the stage besides a sea of heads. Then again, why would you need a clear sightline when, even if your view was blocked by a skyscraper, you could probably get instantaneous updates and live feeds from your social network via a mobile device. It's the urban spectacle of the early 20th century amended by the network culture of the early 21st century, perhaps in the process mitigating the monopoly of Victorian and American 19th park typologies for such occasions.
But we'll probably just end up learning that the choice of venue was informed by budgetary issues or simply that the parade ended there.
2) We're also curious to find out what tactics the city would have employed if they had an urban panic on their hands.
3) We were reminded of Studio Gang's proposal for a sports stadium built right smack-dab in middle of the cramped innards of a city.
“Designed for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale,” we are told, “the stadium design explores the potential of an urban stadium to accommodate throngs of people and disappear when not in use. The proposed structure would employ a kinetic seating bowl, lifted 30 floors above street level, comprised of a series of transforming seating and support elements, many constructed to fold into the adjacent high-rise buildings in a dense urban center.”
Considering the timeframe of its development, one wonders how much cross-pollination was going on between this project and the then nearly finished Millennium Park, that Frankenstein of programming and constituencies “lifted” above a multi-story garage, as well as New York City's failed bid to host the 2012 Olympics for which, at least in the early proposals, the Olympic Stadium would have been built on the West Side of Manhattan.
Perhaps Studio Gang's hyper-programming was more directly informed, after Burnham, by early 20th century epic proposals to build airports, not just way stations for blimps but humongous concrete surfaces filled with winged vuvuzelas, in the bowels of dense metropolises.
In any case, since everyone is predicting multiple championships for the Blackhawks in the near future, perhaps a retrofit in the manner of Studio Gang's stadium might be in order for that particular street intersection for future rallies. To use phraseology en vogue, let's do some urban and infrastructural hacking.
On the day of the event, skyscrapers pop out viewing boxes and lower gangplanks bolted with seats. Windows become electrified and aggregate into a giant television screen. Even the Michigan Avenue bridge is raised to reveal more seating areas. Someone will then shout, Trump Tower, transform! And it will!
Not only will 2 million people be then able to fit in but also the entire population of the Chicagoland area. (It might not, however, adequately contain the apocalyptic hysteria during the victory rally to be held for the Cubs after they finally win the World Series.)
When the crowd dissipates, so too will this hyper-intersection.
4) Just in, via @SubMedina via @loudpaper: RUX's vanishing mosque. “What if a mosque was not a building? What if it vanished into the fabric of a city?”
Speaking of augmented game spaces, here is an interesting interactive installation set to come online at the end of the month in three UK cities. Created by KMA, Great Street Games [dead link] will be a “huge, participatory, high-tech athletics tournament” in which participants in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough compete against each other virtually in real-time using the city as platform.
KMA will use projected light and thermal-imaging technology to create interactive 'courts' in which human movement triggers light effects. The physical movements of players determine the outcome the games, which will run on ten-minute cycles. Participants develop their game-playing skills as they progress through a number of levels to help their area to victory or to simply have fun.
The parameters of this urban sport are described thus:
The ‘courts’ created by projected light; each court comprising a central playing area and two zones representing the other two locations. Balls of light appear from the centre of each court – these projected images can be moved by players physically ‘touching’ them. The aim of the first game is for each location to gain points by moving as many balls as possible to the other locations. Games last 90 seconds and 5 games make a series – through which the games increase in complexity as players become more familiar with the rules. The town or city with the most points at the end wins.
You're walking home alone one night through pedestrian unfriendly, darkly lit corridors. All of a sudden, you trigger a sensor and projectors spray the pavement with technicolor lights. Ebullient geometries seemingly float above the asphalt.
“Wanna play,” a disembodied voice rings out from a speaker.
“Umm, sure,” you instinctively respond, even if you don't how to play what is to be played. “I'll learn along the way,” you say to yourself.
And then it's hours later; the sun is about to rise and wash out the lights. The two of you promise to return the following night (tonight, actually) to continue the game, with friends to make it a team competition. It'll be Chicago vs. Manchester.
“Is this some sort of a next generation MMORPG game?” you wonder.
A week or two later, you find out on Twitter that there are other similar game spaces installed throughout the city, but their locations are a secret. There's no iPhone app for it yet. So you set on a walkabout, hoping that you might again trigger a sensor.
Actions: What You Can Do With The City finally comes to Chicago at the Graham Foundation. Organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the exhibition features “experimental interactions with the urban environment [that] show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city.”
These “actions” tend to be modest in scale and budget, opportunistic and informal, communal and participatory. If broadly categorizing, they might fall messily under the heading of urban hacking. They are not the great tectonic reconfiguration of urban landscape and infrastructure dreamt up by messianic urban planners, urbicidal architects and despotic graphic designers. Rather, they are merely common activities like walking, playing and gardening, but reprogrammed with new tactics to “instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.”
As there are 99 “actions,” we'd like to offer one more to round out the number: urban golf.
While the rules may differ in cities and even within cities, the game is invariably played in urban settings. Rather than in well-tended lawns, players tee offs on the street, sidewalks, alleys or on top of buildings. Urban parks, it would seem, are avoided, though certainly not a prohibited course.
One aspect of the game that we find interesting is that it isn't merely the manifestation of ennui among the hipster crowd. It's guerrilla theater with the requisite social commentary.
Quoting Wikipedia (though we might be quoting an outside text copied almost verbatim but uncited by a wiki editor):
Urban golf is seen by many as social commentary on the nature of golf and its traditional opinions and attitudes [i.e., elitist, sexist and racist club policies]. Considering golf pompous, dogmatic and quite often inaccessible, urban golfers worldwide have adopted many different urban environments as their new course to engage in this recreational pastime. Commonly, urban golf organisations tend toward using disused or under utilised urban areas to play golf, not just to reduce the risk of damage or injury, but also as a statement toward the development and reuse of the city.
We haven't used this meme on this blog yet, so: is there an iPhone app for that?
If not, it probably isn't too difficult to program an app that maps out an urban golf course, pinpoints where the teeing ground and “hole” are located, shows and vectorizes the streets or alleys or parks or bridges or whatever disparate features of the built landscape comprise the “fairway,” and lists what hazards to expect, for instance, traffic, storm drains and street furniture.
Wired to sensors strategically placed on buildings and lamp posts outside the course, this app could even forecast wind speeds at various urban canyons. Perhaps a popular feature would sync your urban golf calendar to Twitter or Facebook, announcing your scheduled tee off time in the hopes that you will be joined by other enthusiasts.
Once finished with one course, it will direct you to the next one and then further on to another and so on until the final hole. Collectively, these courses represent a new urban layer augmented physically and virtually onto the city. At the end of play, you will have explored your city from one end all the way to the other end, perhaps experienced it anew.
It's worth further fantasizing, meanwhile, this imagined urban layer becoming more and more codified. Teeing grounds become permanently delineated, not just marked with chalk. Viewing stands are placed next to the hole. Building facades that abut the fairways will be colored to denote this border. As urban golf becomes grotesquely popular and insanely profitable through sponsorship, these courses become permanent fixtures, like (18) stadiums but carved out of existing urban fill. Traffic and pedestrian flow will be diverted. Commerce will colonize their edges. And the city will grow thick around these recreational voids, encrusting the stadiums with an enveloping shell.
When urban golf suffers the inevitably crash in popularity, what happens to its walled game-spaces will be similar to The Stadium of Domitian, which later became Piazza Navona.
It's also worth further fantasizing the notion that playing through all 18 holes across the city is a form of tactical tourism. The photos decorating this post were downloaded from Urbangolf.fr. We may be embarrassingly stereotyping the people behind the websites, but we're imagining them to be part of an underground scene, whose members are mostly of African and Middle Eastern descent — the ones probably fictionally documented in La Haine. At night after a day of parkour, they trace the imaginary outlines of urban golf courses. Starting from the suburban ethnic ghettos that encircle Paris, from streets disconnected locally from Haussman's boulevards yet ironically connected via immigrations to the rest of the world, they infiltrate the interior arrondissements of the French capital.
From cramped public housing high-rises of the banlieues to fin de sièclehôtels particuliers, from ringed roads to the spacious Jardin du Luxembourg, from the outer flames of race riots into the City of Light, a new breed of urban critics embarks on a self-guided tour of spatial inequity and conflict.
This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. The firsttwo parts covered built projects. This last part contains two unrealized projects, one a student thesis project and the other a masterplan for a major urban revitalization program.
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Published in 306090 07: Landscape within Architecture (2004) is Hans Herrmann's Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project at Clemson University. Sited at the intersection of Interstate 85 and Interstate 285, also known as the topologically knotty Moreland Interchange, in Atlanta, Georgia, this project aimed “to provide new forms of access to the space of the interchange through the introduction and incorporation of an urban park. As a device, the park is designed to bring focus and articulation to the roadway’s existing status as a public monument.”
Because this issue of 306090 is out of print and used ones are rather expensive, we'll quote a good chunk of the article, specifically the part about “organizational tactics”:
The park is arranged according to three structuring systems. One system is made up of a network of paths and event pads or surfaces that define activity zones both on and above the ground plane. The paths link event pads located throughout the park, while also carrying services that may be used to delineate individual event spaces. Power, water, and other utilities are supplemented by secondary sets of inlays (e.g., information-conveying conduits such as telephone lines, DSL, satellite feeds) that are accessed through the paths and pads. The pads and surfaces are paved, inlaid, or sometimes planted. To promote varying forms of occupation, the pads feature points of connection to the utilities supplied through the adjoining paths.
Throughout the course of a year, the paths and pads are opened and closed by a second structuring system: a carefully maintained program of plantings. The continual redefinition of space by shifting vegetation ensures a constant revitalization of the park as new venues and points of interest become available and familiar ones are closed off. In doing so, the park becomes a barometer of sorts through which the seasonal events and traditions of the city may be observed.
Given that the space of the interchange is largely conditioned by the daily cycle of traffic, time becomes the third structuring system. As conceived, the park has two temporal modes. The first is a twenty-four-hour park, comprised of the indeterminate spaces and events supported by the paths and pads, as well as the everyday points of operation such as service stations and welcome centers. The second mode is a carefully defined and choreographed set of events and venues that operate on a pre-determined timetable. That schedule is governed by a calendar of events decided upon by the city and its parks and recreation council. Those systems will function simultaneously to allow for overlaps of use and occurrence to take place while within the space of the interchange and the city at large.
As a civic construct, the proposed park supplements the interchange by supplying it with new opportunities for access. Functioning in many different ways to serve the public, the park and interchange attempt to bring dialogue to, and between, the occupants of both spaces, while fostering a dynamic layering of activities and interactions.
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The East River Waterfront Esplanade and Piers is a planned series of public spaces below and in the vicinity of F.D.R. Drive, an elevated highway on the eastern edge of Lower Manhattan.
The masterplan was developed by multidisciplinary teams that included Ken Smith Landscape Architect, SHoP Architects, several engineering firms and the planning and transportation departments of New York City. You can download it from here.
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Now it's your turn to let us know in the comments (or on twitter — @pruned) what similar “reclaimed” spaces below still functioning highways, bridges and rail lines that we have missed.
