Play Ground How a Dutch Landscape Architect Is Reinventing the Park

Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter Profiles MAY 16, 2016 ISSUE Play Ground How a Dutch landscape architect is reinventing the park. BY ALEXANDRA LANGE When Adriaan Geuze first learned of Governors Island, the site of his new design, he thought it “the coolest spot on the planet.” ILLUSTRATION BY EDA AKALTUN; SOURCE: FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: TIM CLAYTON / CORBIS / GETTY; KENA BETANCUR / GETTY; IMAGE SOURCE / GETTY; PAUL SEHEULT / EYE UBIQUITOUS / UIG / GETTY; CAREL VAN HEES (PEOPLE) he landscape architect Adriaan Geuze hopped onto the grass, cupping his hands to his ears. “You can Thear a million insects,” he said, in his vowelly Dutch accent. “You think, Wow, you are in the jungle.” I heard crickets, birds, a passing jet. Purple and yellow wildflowers crowded the edges of the asphalt path where I was standing, which was dramatically lined with snow- white concrete. Not quite a jungle, but it was hard to believe that we were seven minutes from lower Manhattan, deposited by ferry on Governors Island. The island has shimmered with architectural possibility since being sold back to the people of New York for a dollar, in 2003. Now, because of Geuze, when you pass from the island’s historic district through a vaulted archway in Liggett Hall, a former Army barracks designed by McKim, Mead & White, you shift more than a century in sensibility. On one side, there are gracious officers’ homes with porches. On the other, a curved, man-made landscape rolls out in front of you, like a living map. Ten years ago, the view would have looked very different: as flat as a pancake, and dotted with derelict Coast Guard buildings, including a salty Burger King. A visitor in 2016 finds four paths outlined in thick white concrete curbs that rise and fall from ground level to seating height, like a topographic doodle. Signs point to a lawn, hammocks, and what you are really here to see: the Hills, New York’s newest peaks, crowning a forty-acre park. The curbs are brilliant in the sun, as smooth as marble. An aqueous pattern has been lightly pressed into them, suggesting the wash of tide, frozen in place. They are irresistible in the manner of the yellow brick road, a red carpet, a lighted runway: your eye leaps ahead, and your body has to follow. Geuze pressed pause just at the point where the surrounding cityscape of New York disappears and the rise of the park encloses a visitor. In holding you here, between the city and the peaks, Geuze delays the big reveal, focussing attention on the curtain, on the way that the landscape architecture has embroidered the ground beneath your feet. Then he draws the curtain back to show a star that needs no introduction: as a visitor strolls down the path, the Hills part to reveal the Statue of Liberty. “We wanted to manipulate the eye to create suspense,” Geuze said, of his design team, “so you have a craving to see the statue—and then you see her.” From the top of what’s called Outlook Hill, you can gaze across the harbor to Liberty Island. “We expect people will take a selfie there,” Geuze said. Then, after updating your Instagram, you can turn for a three-hundred-and- sixty-degree view of Staten Island, the Verrazano Narrows, the Brooklyn Bridge, lower Manhattan, Jersey City. “It is like the Bosporus, or the Table Mountain, in Cape Town. The beach of Rio,” Geuze said of the view. “All these currents, they come together, and there’s granite rocks, the great estuary. Every civilization would like to leave footprints here. When I first read about Governors Island, I thought, This is the coolest spot on the planet.” If the High Line provides an elevated perspective on the industrial cityscape, the new geography of Governors Island offers one for the bay. In addition to Outlook Hill, there is Discovery Hill, to the south, which will be more heavily wooded, the better to cloak a new, site- specific sculpture by the British artist Rachel Whiteread. Kids will surely scramble up and down Outlook’s set of giant steps, made with granite blocks recycled from the island’s partly dismantled seawall, and head toward Slide Hill, to the east, whose forty-nine-foot slide terrifies adults. Grassy Hill, to the north, has a twenty-five-foot roll that looks ordinary by comparison —the greensward is intended for picnics and play—but it is still visionary, conjured from a combination of landfill, demolished Coast Guard buildings, and a carefully calibrated soil recipe. As of July 19th, this landscape will be for everyone. Because of the mild winter, and the tight coördination between the design and the construction teams, the Hills will open ten months ahead of schedule. Governors Island has been popular since it opened to seasonal visitors, in 2008. Leslie Koch, the outgoing president of the Trust for Governors Island, has guided the island’s development for the past ten years. (She announced last Friday that she was stepping down.) She likes to point out that the island welcomed four hundred and fifty thousand people in the four months that it was accessible last year—a number surpassed only by New York’s largest cultural institutions. In 2007, Geuze and his landscape-architecture and urban-design firm, West 8, which is based in Rotterdam, won a competition for the Governors Island project. In Koch’s recollection, the conversation around parks in New York at that time centered on resuscitating historic parks like Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Central and Prospect Parks, and on private developers adding pocket-size open spaces to midtown. (The High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park had yet to open.) West 8’s winning proposal would bring a stylized, contemporary park to New York City, on a site that many thought would never be developed. Rotterdam’s Schouwburgplein, or Theatre Square, won West 8 international fame. PHOTOGRAPH FROM GEOGRAPHY PHOTOS / UIG / GETTY Landscape history is filled with major earthworks—hills and grottoes, parterres and canals—but their purpose was often to trick the eye into believing that the landscape had always been that way (the British tradition) or to overwhelm you with the intricacy of plantings, sculpture, and fountains (the French tradition). In either case, until the nineteenth century such gardens were strictly an upper-class diversion. As industrialized cities grew in density, some leaders set aside land, often at the edge of town, as pleasure grounds intended as a public-health benefit. When real-estate values around those parcels rose, they became central rather than peripheral. In the past decade, the thinking about the location of parks has changed. A major occupation of landscape architecture is the reuse and remediation of industrial and infrastructural sites. There’s not much virgin territory left in cities, so to create open space is to begin again on the ruins of the past. In 2004, Chicago’s Millennium Park converted acres of industrial lakefront into a linear landscape with wildflower gardens, sculpture, and a Frank Gehry concert pavilion. In Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park, broad green concrete bridges zigzag over the roads and rails that once cut off the city’s art museum from the water. West 8’s most ambitious completed landscape, Madrid Río, is a park covering a riverfront highway that used to divide the city. Landscape today often abandons the fantasy of playing Mother Nature to achieve spectacular designs that flaunt their manufactured underpinnings, enticing architects to cross over from buildings to the spaces around them. The half-mile-long Superkilen park, in Copenhagen, designed by BIG Architects, Topotek 1, and Superflex, places miniature rolling green hills, a pink patchwork market square, and star-shaped Moroccan-tile fountains into one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, designed by Grant Associates, Wilkinson Eyre, and Atelier Ten, is landscape as entertainment, with a grove of steel Supertrees, overgrown with plants, that provide shade during the day and light up at night. In the Cloud Forest, under a glass dome that resembles Santiago Calatrava’s recently opened Oculus, in lower Manhattan, a thirty-five-metre waterfall crashes down the side of a cone-shaped mountain. Parks have become the new architecture stars, perfectly suited for our green and community- seeking age. euze, fifty-five, is slim and boyish, with scruffy hair and a coat that’s perpetually aflap. (His last name is pronounced “Huh-zaa,” with a guttural “H.”) He is restless when Gseated, reaching for tabletop bric-a-brac to model a scene in 3-D. He’d prefer to cycle, to walk up and down and around the contours and elevation changes that his profession inscribes upon the earth, because that’s when his conversation and inspiration flow. Those curbs, the landscape features that you can stroll beside, sit on, lie on, or walk on, are a built manifestation of his own looping energies. When Geuze won the commission to design Toronto’s Central Waterfront, in 2006, one of his first requests was to be taken to a Canadian lake and taught how to canoe. At a rustic camp on Lake Algonquin, he got his wish, and, in return, taught his host how to fish. On Dutch TV last summer, he was shown making birdcalls from a cell in a twenty-foot-tall concrete honeycomb wall that West 8 designed—and then, like a naughty schoolboy, walking along the top. After leading me to the peak of the Hills, Geuze sat in the more formal part of the Governors Island composition, amid low hedges planted in a leaf-shaped pattern.

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