Striving to be greener may seem like overkill for a new green oasis with 1,300 new trees, but GIPEC and the West 8 Team are incorporating a broad range of sustainable design features into the Park and Public Space Master Plan. Our focus on sustainability makes more sense if you remember that parks are wholly man-made environments. How they [...]
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The selections of plants and trees existing on Governors Island today are a result of the influence of both people and nature. The Island’s familiar mix of lawns, canopy of shade trees, and lovely ornamentals suited the Island’s historic purpose as a military and Coast Guard base. The Historic District’s protected conditions, higher elevations [...]
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Governors Island has a unique relationship to water. It is an island, after all. Every sense tells you water is near: from the fresh salty smell that greets the ferry at Soissons, to the buffer of silence broken only by a little buoy on the southern tip. But the waters themselves are deep and choppy. The busy [...]
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As we’ve been reaching out to the public through various avenues like this blog, exhibits, a survey, and meetings, people have given us all kinds of great suggestions for what they’d like to see and do in the future park. This “word cloud” shows you some of those ideas, with the size of the [...]
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A few weeks back we blogged about the new hills West 8 is designing on the southern end of the Island. Those hills are part of a larger strategy that will use subtle shifts in topography to transform what are now acres of crabgrass and asphalt into an alluring, intriguing park that people will want to explore. This “transformative topography” [...]
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I recently heard Leslie (Koch, GIPEC President) describe bikes as Governors Island’s current “killer app.” That’s a perfect way to describe the phenomenon we witnessed last year when about 35% of our visitors rode bikes on Transportation Alternative’s Free Bike Fridays (the overall percent of visitors on [...]
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This past Tuesday morning, West 8 and GIPEC presented the Governors Island Alliance (GIA) and the Governors Island Advisory Council (GIAC) with an update on the park and public space master plan process. The purpose of the meeting was not only to update the groups, but to get their thoughts on design questions being considered by [...]
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One of the most dramatic features of the West 8 team’s design competition proposal was a set of new hills on the non-historic South Island constructed from recycled demolition debris and fill. The hills would radically change the landscape of the pancake-flat South Island and provide 360-degree views of the harbor and surrounding skylines. During the park master plan process, the West [...]
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As buildings have been demolished on the southern tip of Governors Island, raw open space has been created in the footprints of the old structures. We’ve been working with the West 8 design team to imagine ways of giving this space character and turning a flat barren area into a great destination. This transformation will happen in a number [...]
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So how does the West 8 team go about designing a park? Just what is this mysterious ‘park master plan’? Making a park master plan involves a lot of ‘problem solving’ – What can we design that will make people come back again and again? Where will the pathways go? What will the maintenance requirements [...]
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