IFCCA New City Park Competition

In Urban Design

Posted: Aug 22nd, 2009 / Last Edited: Sep 15th, 2011 Print

Description

New City Park’s multi-layered surface moves and folds, integrating a high density of public and private commercial, recreational, cultural, educational, and community-oriented programs. The proposal examines a strategy for making a public urban space that relates to the complexities, diversity, indeterminacy, and ambiguities of contemporary experience.

The park functions as an organizational strategy for a polyvalent metropolis. The scheme is built around lines of connection and displacement; it organizes the program topologically, in three dimensions – in contrast to the city’s typical planimetric organization. Superimposition, augmentation, and layering increase the utility of the site without sacrificing open space. Advancing ideas that initiated in our Paris Utopie (1989) and Vienna Expo (1995) projects, the park redirects many of the programmatic functions to the lower strata, a series of ground planes, or shifting datums.

At over 80 acres, the armature of public open space connects Manhattan’s interior with the river; it runs from Penn Station over the rail yards and down towards the Hudson River, where it terminates in a floating beach platform. In the areas flanking the Park, zoning envelopes and restrictions, points of connection, and border conditions set design parameters for additional private office, commercial, and residential structures.

The diversion of midtown’s westward development across the project site protects the low-rise residential community of Clinton, currently in the path of development, and instead locates new density adjacent to the most intense multi-modal transportation system in the region. The transportation plan maximizes the utility of the existing infrastructure, and makes strategic additions to the network: a new street-based light rail loop and automated People Mover connect with Penn Station trains, subways and buses, and the ferry.

The scheme takes advantage of energy flows on the site to create more sustainable, integrated systems: vents in the park structure convert the heat of the trains stored below into energy, turbines in the beach platform capture energy from the Hudson’s tidal flows, and the orientation of the park lies on the true solar east-west axis.

In this urban paradigm, development is dynamic; a flexible process that responds to changes in population, program, economy, energy, and transportation over time. The emerging urban construct is no longer linked to a singular city typology, but simultaneously embodies those of historical and emerging cities.

Open publication - Free publishing - More ifcca
New City Park’s multi-layered surface moves and folds, integrating a high density of public and private commercial, recreational, cultural, educational, and community-oriented programs. The proposal examines a strategy for making a public urban space that relates to the complexities, diversity, indeterminacy, and ambiguities of contemporary experience.

The park functions as an organizational strategy for a polyvalent metropolis. The scheme is built around lines of connection and displacement; it organizes the program topologically, in three dimensions – in contrast to the city’s typical planimetric organization. Superimposition, augmentation, and layering increase the utility of the site without sacrificing open space. Advancing ideas that initiated in our Paris Utopie (1989) and Vienna Expo (1995) projects, the park redirects many of the programmatic functions to the lower strata, a series of ground planes, or shifting datums.

At over 80 acres, the armature of public open space connects Manhattan’s interior with the river; it runs from Penn Station over the rail yards and down towards the Hudson River, where it terminates in a floating beach platform. In the areas flanking the Park, zoning envelopes and restrictions, points of connection, and border conditions set design parameters for additional private office, commercial, and residential structures.

The diversion of midtown’s westward development across the project site protects the low-rise residential community of Clinton, currently in the path of development, and instead locates new density adjacent to the most intense multi-modal transportation system in the region. The transportation plan maximizes the utility of the existing infrastructure, and makes strategic additions to the network: a new street-based light rail loop and automated People Mover connect with Penn Station trains, subways and buses, and the ferry.

The scheme takes advantage of energy flows on the site to create more sustainable, integrated systems: vents in the park structure convert the heat of the trains stored below into energy, turbines in the beach platform capture energy from the Hudson’s tidal flows, and the orientation of the park lies on the true solar east-west axis.

In this urban paradigm, development is dynamic; a flexible process that responds to changes in population, program, economy, energy, and transportation over time. The emerging urban construct is no longer linked to a singular city typology, but simultaneously embodies those of historical and emerging cities.

Open publication - Free publishing - More ifcca

Less -