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
According to Van Valkenburgh, the 1970s represented a groundbreaking paradigm shift in the field of ecology, the impact of which he compares to finding out that the world is round. The older view of ecology, taught while he was at Cornell, was that there was an eventual steady state of perfection, or “climax condition,” in nature. “We were taught that what we saw in nature were disturbances,” he explains, “not that the natural world is a dynamic continuum that never has a condition of perfection, that’s always evolving, that’s always moving forward, that’s always environmentally circumstantial.” The newer view embraces this idea that nature is constantly in flux, and his sustainable designs reflect this philosophy.
Landscapes that are designed with the processes of nature in mind are able to regrow, recover, and regenerate without human intervention, because they often mimic the types of plants that are best able to grow under the same conditions. For example, by planting salt-tolerant, current-tolerant marsh plants along the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park—a nod to this site’s former life as a tidal wetland—Van Valkenburgh plans to make the landscape fully sustainable with minimal human aid required. He explains that any landscape that embraces this concept of environmental sustainability must, by necessity, look irregular, informal, and natural. “By definition, sustainable landscapes are more often than not those that are able aesthetically to absorb the kind of irregularities and losses that come with natural processes,” he explains. When you plant a row of trees in a straight line, for example, the aesthetic of the design is effectively ruined if one or more of them dies. Something is missing. Something is out of line.
Van Valkenburgh soon began making a name for himself with ambitious projects worldwide, including a redesign of Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries in 1991, the restoration of Harvard Yard beginning in 1992, and the construction of a number of gardens in and around Boston. Van Valkenburgh served as chairman of Harvard University’s department of landscape architecture from 1991 to 1996. He currently serves as the university’s Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture. Despite his high-profile positions as Ivy League professor and head of a leading design firm, his peers view him as a down-to-earth figure, a “plantsman” at heart. “Michael actually spends a lot of time in nurseries, walking the places himself,” Berrizbeitia says. “Typically the principal of a firm send underlings to do that stuff. He will go. He is best friends with those guys in the fields.”
Inside one of the buildings on the Brooklyn Bridge Park construction site sits a massive model of the park that stretches for nearly forty feet. Senior Associate Nik Elkovitch, a boyish marathon runner who speaks in hesitant, thoughtful sentences, explains that this model was once meant to represent only the northernmost portion of the park. The creative team liked the model so much that they kept building onto it. Before they knew it, the behemoth – all corrugated cardboard and glue gun gobs and cotton-candy-floss trees – had grown too large for their Manhattan offices and had to be transported to the construction site. It now takes up nearly an entire floor of the building.
A quick look at the model reveals the limitations of the construction site. Though the planners have been blessed with the luxury of 85 acres, Robert Moses’ Brooklyn-Queens Expressway has left the space both noisy and cut off from the rest of Brooklyn. “I would say for the first two weeks, I left every day with a headache,” Elkovitch laughs. He has since tuned out the roar of traffic after months on the worksite. But something needed to be done to alleviate the constant hum. A large part of Van Valkenburgh’s work will be undoing the damage created in the 1950s by the construction of the expressway. The cantilevered road, atop which sits the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, was a concession to community organizers who disliked his original six-lane design, which would cut through the neighborhood. Though the innovative design has left the Brooklyn Heights historic district completely intact, the highway has led to a host of problems for the waterfront site.
“One of the first proposals was actually doing a sound wall for the entire length of Furman Street,” he says, pointing on the model to the desolate street between the highway and the park site. “We found that that reflected noise back up into Brooklyn Heights. Which…you don’t want to do. That’s the way the BQE was designed. It’s rounded over underneath the cantilever so that sound is projected out into the river. Well the wall would actually be reflecting it back up into Brooklyn Heights. And the second issue with that is that it created basically a dead zone for car pollution to hang out in, and it would make the walk along Furman Street basically unbearable.” Instead, the designers have chosen to incorporate a nearly thirty foot tall berm that will increase the distance the sound waves must move and thus significantly reduce the volume.
In addition to noise, the BQE effectively cuts the park off from the surrounding neighborhoods, leaving entry points only in DUMBO to the north and Cobble Hill to the south. Van Valkenburgh is confident that the park will still attract visitors because it will incorporate, as he likes to say, “the stuff that people are hungrier for in New York City”: a safe harbor for kayakers, sports fields, a small boat marina. The designers have strategically placed these accommodations – those which cannot be found elsewhere in Brooklyn – at the furthest points from the entrances under the assumption that people will take the time necessary to get to them. “When you’re hungry,” Van Valkenburgh says, “you will go further.”