Governors Island Vision Adds Hills and Hammocks

El joven arquitecto Daniel Vasini, hijo de mis amigos Pilar y Roberto Vasini y hermano de la que será representante de Venezuela en el próximo Miss Mundo(excelente estudiante de medicina en la Universidad del Zulia), Adrianita Vasini, trabaja para la firma holandesa West 8 urban design & landscape architecture b.v., que ha realizado el diseño arquitectónico de "Governors Island" en Nueva York. A continuación la noticia publicada por el New York Times sobre este proyecto.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: April 12, 2010

When the federal government sold Governors Island to the City and State of New York for one dollar in January 2003, it wasn’t clear who had gotten the short end of the stick.



Was it really worth a dollar? Few people had visited the island since it was abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1997. For those who could get onto it, the charm of the 19th- and early-20th-century military buildings on the north end wore off as soon as they saw the southern end, a flat sprawl of concrete barracks and warehouses from the 1970s and ’80s. And in an era when government was increasingly dependent on the private sector to finance what once would have been public initiatives, it was hard to see how the city and state would ever raise the money to develop the island themselves. (A few proposals being tossed around at the time, including a global peace park and a theme SpongeBob SquarePants hotel, didn’t inspire confidence.)

But Sunday’s announcement that the City of New York has reached a deal to take control of the island from the state and will push ahead with a plan that includes a 2.2-mile-long waterfront promenade and a 40-acre park, offers reassuring evidence that even in difficult times it is possible to get the tricky balance between public good and private interests right — or at least right enough.

The plan, by Adriaan Geuze of the Dutch landscape architecture firm West 8, calls for a park that, if realized, will eventually include a cluster of steep, artificially created hills that form a focal point at the park’s center, visually tying it back to the city. Its wildly original array of parkscapes — including a “hammock grove,” a grottolike shelter, playing fields and marshlands — will give the island the kind of strong identity it currently lacks. When considered with Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, under construction across the harbor in Brooklyn, it represents a shift in the character of the city’s park system as a whole that is as revolutionary as Robert Moses’ early public works projects or Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Central Park.

The city has committed $41.5 million to the first phase of the development, which still has to go through the standard public review process, and is tentatively scheduled to begin construction in 2012. A new ferry landing area is to be built at the northern end of the island, with a big shaded lawn overlooking the Lower Manhattan skyline. The northern half of the Great Promenade, which will eventually encircle the entire island, will allow people to stroll along the waterfront under a shaded walkway with views that reach from the Statue of Liberty to Brooklyn Heights. And the city will replace the asphalt parking lot on the south side of McKim, Mead & White’s 1929 Liggett Hall, an old Army barracks that divides the island in half: visitors passing through the hall’s central archway will emerge onto a mosaic terrace bordered by flower beds.

It is from here that the development’s second phase — for which the city will need to raise some $220 million — should eventually unfold. Pathways will wind south through a wild array of sloping lawns and densely wooded areas, with the hills just beyond them in the near distance. Scores of hammocks will be suspended in a forest of oak and birch trees. In a rendering that shows the hammocks sagging under the weight of people napping inside them, they bring to mind human-size cocoons.

This processional narrative reaches its climax with the hills, which will be partly built on the rubble left over from the demolition of the Coast Guard barracks and warehouses. Some will drop off into cliffs on one side, creating “view channels” to major landmarks: for example, one path cuts through a narrow canyon that lines up with the statue of Liberty; another looks out toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. A paved terrace, with a 360-degree view of the island’s surroundings, tops the tallest hill; a more informal meadow another.

To the west, a cafe structure designed by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro will sit at the water’s edge, facing the Statue of Liberty. A lawn expands out onto the building’s roof, where visitors will be able to climb down through a large hole into a grotto-like shelter open to the water.

The island’s southern end culminates in a watery landscape of marshes and tidal basins. By now the hills have entirely blocked out the view of the Manhattan skyline. A raised concrete walkway wraps around the marshes at the tip of the island, so that visitors should feel as if the edge of the land were dissolving around them. To add to the sensory experience, Mr. Geuze plans to plant the area with strong-smelling plants, like sea asparagus and lavender.

The movement within the design — the disappearance and reappearance of carefully framed urban views; the shift from a verticality that intentionally echoes the downtown Manhattan skyline to the flatness of the water’s surface — is its single most impressive feature. But such variations also speak to the ways the city itself is changing. The exaggerated steepness of the hills, for example, is not only a clear nod to their artificiality — a “green” counterpoint to Manhattan’s towers — but also a practical response to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

Another positive aspect of the design is the care that has been given to the boundaries that will divide the park from two future development zones on the island’s east and west sides. These lines are gently curved, giving them a more naturalistic feel, and Mr. Geuze has proposed several major view corridors that will cut through the development areas, which should help mitigate their large size.

The big question is what happens from here. Critical aspects of the project still need to be ironed out. The city has yet to determine who will develop the areas around the park. We might end up with anything from university buildings (New York University has suggested that it could build dormitories and classroom space on the island) to luxury hotels and a conference center. And there are those who will argue, with some justification, that the plan for Governors Island is part of a larger, continuing process of gentrification in New York City that raises its own questions about whom these projects ultimately serve.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s ambitious park plans, in fact, are in some ways contradictory. On the one hand they are genuinely democratic, creating valuable public space that can be shared by all New Yorkers. On the other, they are a savvy way to raise property values, which ends up pushing the poor and middle classes farther and farther out from the city’s center.

Governors Island may turn out to be a crucial project in this respect. Sitting in the middle of the harbor, it ought to be accessible to working-class families from Staten Island and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, as well as to wealthier downtowners and Red Hook’s bourgeois bohemians. The nature of the developments that flank the park will be critical to determining whether the island feels as if it belongs to all of them, or just to those few who can afford to pay for its upkeep.