Field Operations on Designing Freshkills Park
Our big thanks to Jerome Chou and Grace Tang from Field Operations for last Thursday’s Freshkills Park Talk on designing the park. Jerome delivered a great primer on landscape architecture (including a history in two slides!) and talked about the mandate for new model of practice given the nature of the site and the enormity of the project, both in space and time scale. Grace walked us through the design concepts for three early projects: the Digger signage project, Schmul Park and North Park Phase A, and talked about how these projects—especially North Park—bring into specific play the grander ideas of the Draft Master Plan for the park as a whole. A number of the crowd’s questions dealt with maintenance and operations of the park: how it will be staffed, how its cleanliness will be ensured. This was a good opportunity to clarify the separate roles of the designers and the city: we at the Parks Department are responsible for the park and, jointly with the Department of Sanitation, will be in charge of its day-to-day operation.
A PDF of Jerome and Grace’s presentation is available here (it’s a 10MB download). Below are a couple of choice audio clips, each between 3 and 5 minutes long, from the talk. It’s useful to follow along with the PDF while they talk, since they refer to images a lot; each clip indicates the first slide it references.
Clip 1: A brief history of landscape architecture. Starts on Slide 12, “Context.”
Clip 2: Time, space and what makes Freshkills Park so unique. Starts on Slide 18, “2011 / 2016 / 2036.”
Clip 3: A walk through the Field Operations design for Schmul Park. Starts on Slide 42, “Schmul Park.”
Next month’s talk, “Urban Ecology at Fresh Kills,” will be given by Dr. Steven Handel from Rutgers University, who has conducted ecological research at Fresh Kills since the early 1990s. Dr. Handel will be talking about what we can learn from Fresh Kills in developing strategies for restoring ecology in our cities. As always, this event is free of charge.
June 25th, 7:30 pm at the Staten Island Museum.
