Fascinating, Ray. Truly thought-provoking. Thank you very much.
Fond though I am of park planning, and eager though I am to suck up to
landscape architects in public if it'll shave 3% off their final bill
... still I suspect one reason Needle Park is no longer a crime-ridden
vortex is not "because" it has been "renewed" as Bryant Park, but
because the entire island of Manhattan has been relentlessly gentrified
by overwhelming market forces over the past 15 years, if I read
correctly between the lines of my New Yorkers. So it may be a case of
planning following, rather than preceding, demographic changes in the
neighborhood. Still fasinating, though.
-- Tony West
the latest issue of penn's alumni magazine (the pennsylvania gazette)
has a fascinating cover story on laurie olin, penn's renowned
landscape architect, and the field of landscape architecture -- its
place in the public sphere.
and then I read this passage, which I thought captured what so many of
us have been talking about wrt ucd, ucd's nid, clark park, the vision
of the anointed, citizenship as consumerism, etc.:
[Olin:] "Part of our social obligation is to make places that are
safe and supportive of human activity, and in many cases
are background for other things. Sometimes the people
should be the flowers."
There is no better example of this essentially
sociological approach to design than the renewal of
Bryant Park. Situated in midtown Manhattan behind the New
York Public Library, the four-block courtyard had by 1980
become a crime-ridden vortex of urban abandonment
popularly known as Needle Park.
"It was dangerous," Olin remembers. "It was run-down.
People weren't putting money into it. People were afraid
to go into it. It was deteriorating. People were killed
there."
It is not often that society turns to a landscape
architect in hopes of preventing the murder of its
citizens, but Hanna/Olin's final design helped to turn
one of the city's most frightening places into one of the
safest and most popular. Their approach struck some as
paradoxical. By stripping away the barriers that
protected the park from the bustle of traffic on its
edges, they aimed to turn what had been conceived as a
peaceful respite from urban life into a busy focal point
of it. Forsaking grand gestures and concentrating instead
on tiny details like balustrades and folding chairs, they
refashioned Bryant Park stitch by stitch.
"At first glance, the park looks almost the same, just a
cleaner, fresher version of the old," architecture critic
Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times. "But the
cumulative effect of small changes is to render it a
dramatically different place, vastly more open than
before, more tied to the street and the city around it."
Here there was another level of paradox, for Hanna/Olin's
success in restoring the urban qualities of Bryant Park
stemmed from the partial commercialization of what had
previously been purely public space. The redevelopment
had been underwritten by the privately funded Bryant Park
Restoration Corporation, one of the first examples of
what are now commonly known as Business Improvement
Districts. By effectively taking over the municipal
government's responsibility for managing the park, the
BPRC won the privilege to use it as a venue for
entertainment programming, restaurant concessions, and
the like. Hanna/Olin's disciplined design was a critical
piece of this new vision.
"In a sense, it tells you that it's controlled, that it's
not 'true public,'" says George Thomas. "It's sort of
like a mall, or the mall as a public space but under
private control. And as a result, people are expected to
behave in a certain way. You could almost make the case
that Bryant Park is a highly corporatized landscape, and
in its lack of freedom it tells you what it expects of
you.
[aka ray]
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