The competition challenge stands first at a metropolitan scale (slide 1). As a matter of fact, if Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan assumes its gateway role towards central park, Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn doesn’t assume the same role regarding Prospect Park.
Instead of being a connecting hub, the public Plaza isolates important public spots: subway accesses, the fountain, the memorial arch, the public library, Prospect park and the Park Slope and Crown Heights neighborhoods. For this reason, G.A.P doesn’t offer any facilities in its core; they are all spread around the plaza (slide 2).
Our project consists in imagining an urban mutation of the Plaza into a handy public space for both pedestrian and vehicles where nature would take back its place while motorways has today taken it in hostage. Finally, GAP would turn into an expansion of Prospect Park.
Analyzing the site, we focused on the « contrast » notion, which is totally missing on the site since the distinction between pedestrian paths and traffic lanes is highly blurry and the induced global visual effect is chaotic and therefore scaring (slide 3).
If usual architectural and urban tools will allow in long term to solve those problems by heavy infrastructural changes (within ten years at least between design and realization), we tried to imagine and propose a short-term solution that could be put into practice from tomorrow on and during the construction work of the long term solution, chosen by the city.
This proposal affirms itself as a citizen oriented solution, based on a participative form helping and informing the area residents and the usual car drivers on the site in order to prepare themselves to the upcoming mutations of the plaza and solving the actual main problems without waiting 10 more years.
The project consists in an urban acupuncture, easy to settle and efficient quickly (slide 4).
To do so, we designed a set of tools (equivalent to the acupuncture pins), which we propose to plug on specific points of the site (slide 5).
By diverting the existing context (urban furniture, side walks, crosswalks…), occupying left over spaces and opening to the public the existing planted mounts on the two sides of the Plaza to insert new temporary programs (the Green Market, restaurant for the workers during the renovation works, information points, cafes, exhibition gallery, flee market…) (slide 6 and 7), we hope to reveal the qualities of the existing square and improve it by tomorrow morning (slide 8), making Grand Plaza Army a comfortable and attracting gateway to Prospect Park soon.
We’re not offering a frozen project but a global and flexible concept that can be developed with other specialists as graphic designers, landscape artists, designers, artists, in association with the local residents and neighborhood associations in order to bring energy and effervescence to G.A.P. to become a central urban park for Brooklyn even before the long term renovation starts.