The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
A Park Grows in Brooklyn
Michael van Valkenburgh takes back New York’s waterfront.
By Nicholas DeRenzo
Michael Van Valkenburgh.
Michael Van Valkenburgh stands on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the traffic of Robert Moses’ two-tiered Brooklyn-Queens Expressway roaring beneath him. He looks out on the post-industrial wasteland of Piers 1 through 6, an unsightly expanse of exposed concrete and asphalt, framed by the downtown Manhattan skyline. It is hard to imagine that this stretch of grays and browns will be turned into one of New York City’s largest green spaces within the next decade. It is equally hard to imagine that this man in the thick-framed glasses, paint-speckled gray hooded sweatshirt, and sage scarf will oversee this historic feat of urban planning and landscape design. With his copious laugh lines and perma-tousled hair, bordering on an uncombed faux-hawk, he looks more like an aging indie rock star or a celebrity chef than this generation’s answer to Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer responsible for Central Park and Prospect Park.
“This Promenade is something that our park has a very strong dialogue with,” he says, as he looks over the ledge at the construction site of the future Brooklyn Bridge Park. “This is a perch, a prospect, a thing above, a thing for looking down. Our park is all about activating and engaging the water’s edge. This is the more classic. I think this is something that distinguishes what we’re doing from what Olmsted might have done.” There is an undertone of the class warrior in this statement, whether intentional or not. Moses’ Promenade was for the residents of Brooklyn Heights. His park will be for everyone.
Stretching from the Manhattan Bridge south toward Atlantic Avenue, the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park will represent one of the largest expansions of parkland in Brooklyn since Olmsted completed Prospect Park in the 1860s. Encompassing the long-defunct Piers 1 through 6, which became obsolete with the advent of container shipping, the park will reclaim these lifeless vistas and replace them with great lawns, rolling pastoral meadows, and tidal saltwater marshes. In a bold move for a New York City park, the landscape will also be highly connected to the water. Floating wave attenuators will create a safe harbor that allows visitors to actually enter the East River without worrying about the smashing wakes from passing ships. One of the most innovative design features of the park involves cutting off the piers from the land, essentially turning them into islands which will be connected to the park via footbridges.
Though his projects are uniquely modern in their embracing of contemporary design concepts like ecological sustainability and reclamation of toxic post-industrial sites, Van Valkenburgh’s ideas are in constant dialogue with the great urban planners of New York City’s past, such as Olmsted and Robert Moses. Paul Goldberger, New Yorker architecture critic and co-editor of the upcoming Michael Van Valkenburgh: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Yale University Press), writes in the book’s foreword, “Where Van Valkenburgh finds complete common ground with Olmsted is in his commitment to the notion of the public park as an expression of the democratic idea. Both landscape architects embrace the notion of public space as the equalizer, the place open to all where distinctions diminish, social classes fade into the background, and peaceful coexistence prevails. Van Valkenburgh shares Olmsted’s democratic idealism.”
Although Van Valkenburgh agrees with Olmsted’s overarching views on the role of public spaces, the two designers differ significantly in their ideas about copying nature. Like Brooklyn Bridge Park, Olmsted’s grand creations were wholly constructed and man-made, but he worked to obscure this artificiality. As Goldberger writes, Olmsted was “quite willing to let you think that the park’s designer was not Olmsted but God.” Van Valkenburgh has no such delusions. Anita Berrizbeitia, associate chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s landscape architecture department and Goldberger’s co-editor, argues that Van Valkenburgh is consciously upfront about the artificiality of his designs. “He doesn’t want to tell people that it’s natural,” Berrizbeitia says. “Michael is very committed to showing people the necessary artificiality of nature because of what we have done to the cities before.” Because of the devastation caused by industrialization, designers can no longer pretend that their parks are untouched or natural.
Ironically, despite this fundamental difference in theory and approach, Van Valkenburgh’s designs often incorporate the unkempt naturalism better associated with the nineteenth-century designers. Michael Van Valkenburgh has become the go-to landscape architect for projects which require an aesthetic complexity, one that stands in stark contrast with the Zen-like simplicity of contemporary, corporate landscape design. Goldberger writes, “Van Valkenburgh is not one of those modernist landscape architects who you suspect would rather be designing buildings. He shows no interest in embracing the minimalist aesthetic of his architect colleagues, like so many of his fellow landscape designers.” One imagines the archetypal city plaza, tucked between two sleek skyscrapers, constructed with elegant pavers and straight rows of thin, perfect trees – a far cry from Van Valkenburgh’s Teardrop Park in Battery Park City. Completed in 2006, the park contains granite boulders, naturalistic plantings, a small constructed wetland area, and an imposing rock wall made from New York State sedimentary rocks. The nearly two-acre space, surrounded by four high-rise apartments in downtown Manhattan, is dynamic and wild. It represents an escape from the rigidness of the surrounding buildings, not a reflection of them.