RePARK: FRESH KILLS LANDFILL END USE PLAN

Staten Island, NY: 2001

The 2,200-acre site at Fresh Kills is almost 3 times the size of Central Park, its more famous counterpart in Manhattan. Unlike the latter--or for that matter most municipal parks--whose maintenance regime is directed toward the preservation of a single, static appearance, FreshKills tells an extraordinary story of evolution and change. Just as its history began long before its use as a landfill--now covered--its next incarnation will likely not be its last. Our proposal for this latest re-making of Fresh Kills, re-named RePark, is conceived to accommodate not only the inevitable ecological changes that accompany a project envisioned to have such a long life span, but also political and economic ones, and the alteration of priorities and agendas these can bring. It makes change itself the theme, experience and lesson of the place. This is achieved through a two-part design strategy: first, extrapolating a series of diverse "ecologies" from the differing regions of the site, and second, then projecting upon these a "Transect", or schedule of programs--each with its own timeframe--in order to provide for not one, but many possible sets of contingencies and itineraries. The result is a "new ground” (above the landfill cover) that becomes a programmable surface both whose appearance and whose occupants—plants, animals, people—would change according to both the evolving state of the site (i.e. the landfill, the tides, etc.), economic conditions, and ideas of leisure (i.e. lifestyle, etc.). Visitors from all walks of life would have reason to visit the grounds all year round, as the site would neither look nor function the same from year to year, season to season—even week to week.

The 8 ecologies consist of: 1) Walking Wetland; 2) Roadside; 3) Woodland; 4) Tidal Wetland; 5) Freshwater Wetland; 6) Commercial Berm; 7) Landfill Mounds; and 8) World Trade Center Memorial Forest. All but the last, whose materials are drawn from the site of 9/11 itself, are derived from the range of habitats found on the site, and would be reinstated and allowed to evolve and change as natural systems with minimal maintenance. The linear or seasonal predictability of these ecologies are intended to both parallel and act as a background for the more event-based transects. The role of the latter, of which there would be many at any given time in the life of the park, is two-fold: first, as temporary sites of programs created through special fundraising efforts and installed in the park in a manner not unlike a traveling exhibition at a museum. The second, more perfunctory purpose of the transects is to serve as a provisional circulatory network of pathways that, like the NYC subway system, connects the entries to the park to various destinations in it, as well as those destinations to one another. However, unlike the ecologies, which require little man-made intervention, the design and substance of the transects consist of the use of materials recycled from elsewhere in New York City, or would be an actual byproduct of material naturally “produced” at the site itself. (Therefore, the materials and character of each transect are “recyclings” of the “found” material within each ecology that it passes through: for instance, one transect could be shaped of hay bales made of the cut grass from the landfill mounds it crosses). At RePark, both maintenance and the lack thereof are directed toward and used to create change, with change being the phenomenon by which the park as a cultural institution encourages us to recycle, recollect and recreate.

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