Throughout Long Island, infrastructure defines place. Highway signs, mile markers and billboards become the image of the suburbs. To break this dominance of image, the infrastructure can be utilized to organize experiential movement and activities creating a definable place.
Urban Strategy:
The strategy is to utilize the various types of infrastructure and their links to create a new typology of infrastructure that enables Bethpage to become a definable place without reliance upon signs or markers. Characteristics unique to Bethpage and its history can be brought to the foreground by the organization of infrastructure.
Conditions: Regionally, East - West highways divide the island's length into three parallel pieces. North - South highways divide these pieces into zones, but also reflect a scalar jump in space and time from one zone to the next. This slippage of scale and slippage of speed (time) can be seen in the experiential movement through. As a person moves from one district to another, scales change as the suburban landscape changes. Around Bethpage the infrastructure is the mechanism that draws limits and creates boundaries. The Northern State Parkway, Southern State Parkway, and the Oyster Bay Expressway act as containers, because they seem impenetrable except at very specific locations. The railroad acts as a bisector, splitting and fragmenting the site. There are also connectors, parkways linking specific districts while allowing others to filter through.
Probes: The Probe areas gather the existing infrastructural information in order to establish a new road condition which allows times and scales to coexist. This new typology will be a combination of Boulevard and Promenade, a drivable yet very walkable space. One probe area absorbs the various types of infrastructure at one level, regional roads, local roads, neighborhood roads, and pedestrian paths, and organizes and reasserts multiple scales into a singular, unique condition which enters the armature of the site (the Boulevard/Promenade). The second probe condition is a transitory condition. A new train station, bus terminal, and park and ride, is developed by a study of the networkings of infrastructural activities. (Neighborhood roads, for instance, are patterned in a sort of grid, whereas the regional roads of Long Island create zones within its three pieces; both are networks of infrastructure.) At the culmination of these activities a node is created that exists in a sort of tension with the activity and organization of the infrastructure through the first probe area. By this tension, information is pulled from each probe justifying the speed and scale of the activities in the armature between. The new Boulevard/Promenade created by this tension gives "Place" to Bethpage.
