Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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within the larger landscape pieces, like the recreational
fields, pebble beaches, plazas, promenades, and water
access points. At the smallest end of the spectrum are
the courtyards and play spaces that create an interior
world for the residential buildings. Landscape typologies
thus inform the design starting with the regional scale
and are applied at each successive scale of urban form,
mediating the psychological experience of contemporary
life and informing the social, economic, aesthetic, and
environmental development of the city. (Figure 3)
Each of the other schemes, by Atelier Girot, Weiss-Manfreidi,
and Stoss Landscape Urbanism, embrace the idea
of more landscape in the city and improved site ecologies
but still offer a fairly status quo relationship between the
city and the landscape: the architecture of the city and
the transportation corridors are the framework around
which all elements of the landscape, both ecological and
experiential, drift and accumulate. The fact that these
three teams accepted the competition’s suggestion that
the Keating Channel be removed to make way for the
new naturalized mouth of the river, had the effect of further
isolating the proposed neighborhood from Toronto’s
downtown urban core, and eliminating an authentic
industrial-scale artifact that provided a legitimate urban
landscape in its own right, one that tied the city to its
past. By contrast, MVVA’s preservation of the Keating
Channel and the proposal for a large waterfront park
that ties the various objectives of the project – urban,
ecological, and infrastructural – together demonstrates
a belief that a range of landscape typologies, integrated
into a system of human and natural functions, was the
engine best suited to drive the societal, infrastructural,
and environmental transformations projected for the site.
In this conception of the city the large park, as well as the
small urban spaces, become active participants in the
operations of the urban mechanism while continuing to
offer the restorative functions that open landscapes are
recognized as offering the human psyche.
Reflecting the interconnectedness of landscape systems,
most site strategies have multiple impacts, for instance,
the proposed wetlands are supported and fed by the
stormwater from the development because the river is no
longer dependable in its flow and cannot support these
habitats independently. In other words, the wetlands
support the city by removing portions of the stormwater
burden in peak events, but the structure of the city also
supports the wetlands and their habitats. Similarly,
the new river and parklands are ecologically productive
and important social catalysts, but they also augment
economic health by increasing development values and
lowering the likelihood of devastating flood damage. On
the level of construction pragmatism, the building up of
the site for flood protection provides an opportunity to
mass balance the soils from the river excavation.
The naturalized river is a fiction, of course, and a human
creation just as surely as was the canal, the expressway,
and the city itself. Given the fact that the native condition
of the site, a vast wetland exceeding the current project
limits by a factor of ten, has been completely eradicated
from the site for at least a century, and that the project
site itself is but a fraction of the size of the original
marsh, the MVVA scheme, for all of its landscape vigor,
is not an attempt to restore the land’s pre-development
ecology. Instead, the scheme adopts a range of landscape
typologies that are supportive of city life and suited
to current capabilities of the site: urban, civic, natural,
and boundless.
Landscape Typologies in Brooklyn Bridge Park
In 2003, after having been a subconsultant on an original
master planning team, which was lead by an economic
developer, MVVA was awarded the commission to lead
a team of ecologists, economists, engineers, architects,
and artists in the design of the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge
Park site which occupies 1.3 miles of Brooklyn waterfront
that passes underneath two major bridges and includes
a series of mammoth industrial piers, each 5 acres in
area. The project was well-grounded politically, inspired
by community activism and conceived by the state and
city governments with a strong mandate for ecological
sustainability, a condition that is not uncommon in recent
urban projects, although the enthusiasm for exploring
its possibilities ranges widely among clients. Unique
to Brooklyn Bridge Park was a simultaneous mandate
for economic sustainability. Rather than operate within
city or state budgets, the economic engine for funding
park maintenance and repairs was to be developed as
part of the park. The original legislation creating the
park stipulated that up to 20% of the 85-acre project
site could be designated as development areas rather
than public open space. It was up to the design team,
working with the neighborhood and the client, to manage
the multiple related variables of park design, anticipated
maintenance, development location, use, and size, and
projected revenues.
The reality of the site’s isolation, a fact compounded by
its long, narrow configuration, would have been difficult to
overcome had the designers not been given the mandate
to simultaneously introduce some form of new economic
development. In the original 2000 master plan, this economic
development was approached in a relatively traditional
way, for instance with the introduction of revenuegenerating
activities on Pier One to provide a draw into
the park from the relatively active Fulton Ferry entrance.
By comparison, the 2005 Master Plan treats the mandate
for economic development as one of many strategies for
developing a dynamic relationship between city and park
through a diverse arrangement of landscape typologies.
On the park side, this meant the strategic fortification of