HOW TO UNRAVEL AN AMERICAN QUILT: DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN
Group members:
Nicole Comp
Monica Fernandez
Hsueh Cheng Luen
Renia Markogianaki
Stephen Wong
If the greater metropolitan area of New York can be thought of as a quilt then the borough of Brooklyn is an intricate weave of many different ethnic groups and neighborhoods. Downtown Brooklyn, linked to Manhattan by the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, is a city away from the city. Its fabric is sewn together by a maze of networks such as the subway, highway and communications systems that at one scale seem to function efficiently as conduits merely passing through the area. At a larger scale, however, these networks create obstacles; they interrupt the grid that is an underlying framework. As the quilt further unravels, diverse patches of activities and characters are separated by megablocks, lost spaces, variedbuilding types and topography. Lastly, the civic center, which is at the heart of the area, lacks character and a sense of identity. Instead of being the focal point of the city, it is as isolated as downtown Brooklyn is from the rest of the borough.