This project creates a highly visible, experiential public infrastructure that responds to the shifting ecosystem of Jamaica Bay and defines a new vision of the relationship between nature and people.  Though within New York City, it is a stretch to call this an urban park in the context of Manhattan.  Gateway must be made more accessible in terms of its idea.

On a marginal landscape with great biotic diversity, we believe that people should be educated that ecosystems are in necessary flux, a cycle increasingly complex with today’s global climate shifts.  Capturing the diversity of Gateway’s ECOTONES, or zones of ecological tension, we propose an urban park that creates a microcosm of shifting habitats, program and landforms.  These ecotones then operate at the larger scale of Jamaica Bay’s salt-marshes to reanimate those processes made static by decades of urban dross, fill and dredging.

Great cities have a hard edge, a definite sense of place and identity.  This designed strategy of jetties and piers, marshlands, tides and rising sea levels defines where the ecotone line will be drawn – the way people map boundaries and communicate them at a more human scale.  In doing so, we establish a sense of place prepared to mark the future of our ‘natural’ environment.  We’re approaching the notion of a complex landscape, actively constructed, naturally passive, and which reconceptualizes the national park where urban decay, renewal and refuge can coexist.­

Published: June 05, 2007
Last modified: Jun 05, 2007