Landscaping as a Seductive First Step
WATER VUS A rendering of Hunters Point South, a proposed 5,000-unit housing development, shows a park with jetties along the waterside paths.
ON a quiet inlet of the Queens waterfront, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed putting up athletes for the 2012 Olympics, land is being cleared for a series of parks that will be the front lawn for a large midpriced housing development.
Hunters Point South, to be built where the East River meets the Newtown Creek, kicked into gear in late December with the arrival of bulldozers. The 30-acre project, beginning with park and open space design, will eventually include 5,000 apartments and a ferry landing, said Joshua Wallack, who is managing the project for Robert C. Lieber, the deputy mayor for economic development.
The city expects to solicit developers’ bids for the apartments by summer, Mr. Wallack said. Under terms the city’s Economic Development Corporation spelled out for the local community board last November, 3,000 of the apartments are to be affordable to families making incomes around the area’s median.
Apartments will be “mostly rental,” the city proposed. The most expensive of the subsidized units will cost roughly twice those set aside for middle-income tenants. The development will be a mix of town houses and apartments, Mr. Wallack said; towers will be as high as 400 feet. The waterfront parks are to serve first as a lure to developers and then to potential tenants.
“The city needed to signal to a fairly skittish development community that it’s serious about this project,” said Michael Manfredi, a partner in the New York firm Weiss/Manfredi, the landscape architects on the project along with Thomas Balsley Associates. “Unlike most projects, where open space follows housing and lots of charged debate, here the open space comes first.”
Mr. Manfredi, whose firm designed the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, showed a reporter plans for an oval lawn at one end of the property for soccer and sunset viewing, a small beach on the site of a seasonal bar, a ferry landing and paths along the marshes at water’s edge.
Marion Weiss, the firm’s other partner, says a rise provides an “Acropolean” view of the East Side skyline — and Mr. Manfredi described the setting as “surreal” and “Fellini-esque.”
He was referring to a design that calls for natural features unexpected in an urban landscape: a grassy hill, fields, trees at the shoreline and jetties that provide what Mr. Manfredi called “the wedding photo op.”
The site is near a school and a few blocks from the No. 7 train.
Mr. Wallack says the plans call for parking for only 40 percent of the residents. Garages will be above ground, he said, because an underground structure would interfere with the water table.
The attempt to limit cars may make the project less controversial than other major plans that Mayor Bloomberg has hatched — and the speed with which the site is being cleared signals the mayor’s keenness to build before his third term ends.
Two days before Christmas, in Weiss/Manfredi’s garment district office, a team worked into the evening under pinned-up contour maps and drawings. “When you see this many architects at work," Mr. Manfredi said, jokingly, “that means the project is happening.”
------------------
source: The New York Times
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar