2007 Awards

Planning, Analysis, Research, and Communication | Brooklyn Bridge Park 2005 Master Plan

Honor Award              

Brooklyn Bridge Park 2005 Master Plan
Brooklyn, NY

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.

In 2003, after having been one of many collaborators on a preliminary master plan for the site, MVVA, and a team of more than a dozen subconsultants, including engineers, artists, environmental experts, architects, and economic advisors, were selected to design Brooklyn Bridge Park, an 85-acre site that will provide spectacular views of New York City from the Brooklyn Waterfront. In addition to developing the programming of the park and its overall spatial design and form, MVVA was hired to oversee strategies for economic and environmental sustainability. Upon completion in 2012, the park will occupy 1.3 miles of Brooklyn waterfront from the Manhattan Bridge in the north to Atlantic Avenue in the south. The park master plan is radical because it achieves its range by combining the two most forceful things on the site--the viscerally powerful feeling of engineering of the site's industrial history (including the rectilinear nature of the piers, the built water's edge, and the roar of the city itself) with an introduced in-vitro green landscape; cultivated and natural, used in the plan to create a third, totally new, park condition, one where the site's industrial history is syncopated with cultivated lawns and juxtaposed against new pieces of wildscape, especially at the water's edge.