James Corner Turning Trash Mountains into the Park of the Future

Recently we wrote about Sarah Price’s innovative garden design for the upcoming London Olympics based on a naturalistic aesthetic and native planting. On the other side of the Atlantic, James Corner has spent the last seven years planning a similar but exponentially larger project called Fresh Kills Park adjacent to Staten Island near New York City. Both are looking to redefine the public park as a place that is ‘grown’ instead of designed to replicate a pastoral or a formal modernist model. The desire is to embrace the character of the land, both the assets and challenges. For Corner, the challenges look completely daunting. The ground he’s planting in is made of garbage.

Corner and his firm Field Operations are used to challenging conditions though. The firm has played a key role in the transformation of the High Line elevated rail line into a public park. The Fresh Kills project began when Corner won a competition nearly a decade ago to transform the land that used to serve as New York City’s trash can. Overtime large unsightly hills of trash came to dominate the site. Corner’s counterintuitive entry stood out because he leveraged the hills, some natural and some garbage filled to the design’s advantage to create open vista’s.

I said, Look, whatever we do we’ve got to keep the big and green. These are views and vistas that most people in a city would have to drive three or four hours to see.

This decision of working with the conditions has become the conceptual centerpiece of the entire parks design. They determined that the goal was not to build a new park on top of an old dump. Instead, they would make the old dump a part of the new park, by acknowledging it, reclaiming it, and recycling it as many ways as possible. Rather than trying to create an pristine vision, the landscape architects consider their job more of a collaboration with the landfill itself. Others who have followed the project feel that Fresh Kills could be the best model for how we think about developing parks and transforming land in the future.

When completed the 2,315 acres of open space will host restored maritime forests, dry prairies with chestnut trees, and swampland that will be home to many species of marine animals and birds. Very few urban parks compare in size to what Fresh Kills will become. Central Park won’t even be close to half the size. The park will support a wide range of activities from mountain biking and kayaking to cross country skiing and all manner of field sports.

Work is beginning at the site. Field Operations has designed a sign located near an expressway that announces the project. The sign is suspended from a partially disassembled industrial digger that was used in the dump. The intention with the sign is also to encourage public engagement in the project.

One of the biggest things about Fresh Kills, says Corner, is that there are so many bureaucracies and entities involved. And there’s no king, there’s no mayor, there’s no one individual. Whatever happens is going to be a collective. You’ve got to continually mediate conflicting interests. The most complicated part of the design is the idea that it is designed to change. Large parks will always exceed singular narratives, Corner wrote in a recent essay. They are larger than the designer’s will for authorship. He added, The trick is to design a large park framework that is sufficiently robust to lend structure and identity while also having sufficient pliancy and ‘give’ to adapt to changing demands and ecologies over time.

[ via NYMag ]