We profile notable and award-winning projects at home and abroad .
6
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AOTEAROA
Agenda :
We profile notable and award-winning projects at home and abroad .
UNTIL THE NINETEENTH CENTURY , MOST GARDENS and parklands were strictly an upper-class diversion . As industrialized cities grew in density , benevolent civic leaders occasionally set aside land ( often at the edge of town ) as leisure grounds intended as a public-health benefit for the lower orders .
In the past decade , the thinking about urban parks has changed . A major occupation of landscape architecture is the reuse and remediation of industrial and infrastructural sites . There ’ s not much virgin territory left in cities , so to create open space is to begin again on the ruins of the past .
Governors Island is a 172 acre island in the heart of New York Harbor . It ’ s less than a kilometre from Lower Manhattan , and even closer to Brooklyn . Once a major base for the United States Coast Guard , it was sold back to the people of New York for a dollar , in 2003 .
Now transformed by Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze , and West 8 Urban Design , when you pass from the island ’ s historic district through a vaulted archway in Liggett Hall , a former barracks designed by McKim , Mead & White , the 19th and 21st centuries merge easily together . On one side , there are gracious homes , once occupied by the top brass of the USCG . On the other , a curved , man-made landscape rolls out in front of you , like a living map .
Ten years ago , the view would have looked very different : as flat as a pancake , and dotted with derelict Coast Guard buildings . Now , paths outlined in thick white concrete curbs that rise and fall from ground level to seating height . Signs point to the Hills , New York ’ s newest peaks , in a forty-acre park .
Twenty-five per cent of the bulk of the Hills is material recovered from the demolition of the Coast Guard structures and parking lots . This land-fill forms the Hills ’ core . To lighten the load on the manmade island , parts of the tallest hill are made from pumice , which drains well , and weighs half as much as regular fill .