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. This is where you have a coffee before setting off on your island adventure. “In my childhood, I had such a strong experience hanging around in the landscape,” he told me. “I was a bird-watcher, but I also hunted and collected bird eggs. I had a cousin, he was rougher than I and even more of a daredevil. We could jump over canals with a stick, literally cross the landscape. We caught pike in an illegal way—made lines in the evening and picked them up in the morning—and sold them to the restaurants. I had a radius of twenty miles when I was ten or eleven years old.”

Growing up in Dordrecht, a Renaissance city in the western Netherlands, Geuze lived on the green edge between town and country. This being the Netherlands, there was no mistaking the division: on one side, a canal bordered by tightly wedged row houses; on the other, a path and perhaps a house on top of a high grassy dike, a thin line of blue water, a flat farm field or a rough stand of trees. Each plot was a rectangle, or as close to a rectangle as engineers like Geuze’s father and grandfather could build. “Ecology in Holland is in grids,” Geuze said. “Every frog in Holland is in a line, because all the water is linear.”

But that geometry didn’t bring boredom or conformity. “The smell of the tide near Dordrecht, it intoxicated my brains,” Geuze said. “All the boys were into soccer, but I could not play soccer.” Waiting out the school day, he would think, he said, “I have a tree hut. I have secret places you don’t even know where they are.” When Geuze was a teen-ager, his father took him along to international industry and agricultural shows. “We went to the German Hanover machinery expos, where there would be not five machines but five thousand machines. He took me on very big boats, at least in my imagination—ocean steamers—and even an oil platform. Even into the engine rooms, where the violent noise was there. When I am romantic, I am thinking about these things.”

Building the pergola, in Utrecht’s Máximapark, involved the local community. PHOTOGRAPH BY JEROEN MUSCH

The project that first brought West 8 international fame is a prime example of Geuze’s romance with nature and machinery. Schouwburgplein, or Theatre Square, is a plaza built atop a parking garage, in central Rotterdam, that by the nineteen-eighties had become a needle park. A methadone clinic in a nearby church attracted thousands of drug addicts from across northern Europe, and, eventually, the neighbors rebelled against the crime and the crowds. Geuze lived not far away, in Lijnbaan, a modernist postwar development that put housing and a then revolutionary pedestrian shopping mall in the bombed-out central city. “I had broken car windows. My car radio and bicycle were stolen more than once,” Geuze said. “Politicians had made crazy plans for the plaza that were very expensive, but the outcome was zero.”

In 1994, West 8 was asked to propose a redesign of the park. “Clean it, take the terraces out, give the garage a face-lift,” Geuze recalls being told. “Give us a festival plaza that can be easily cleaned, with benches and lamps.” The brief was for a defensible space, with no place to hide, and no complicated elements that would be hard to maintain or easy to damage. But a lamppost, in that grim setting, didn’t need to be straight from Narnia. “We thought, O.K., they asked us to do a lamp in the city of Rotterdam,” Geuze said. “Of course, that lamp will refer to the docklands—it will be hydraulic.”

Geuze and West 8 designed four tall, hinged, gantry-like lampposts painted the signature red of the city’s Willemsbrug Bridge, and set them along one side of the plaza. They loom over it like dinosaurs. “Six-year-old boys, they are craving to go to the plaza, push the button, and set the lamp in motion,” Geuze said. Children of Geuze’s button-pushing temperament can indeed create a mechanical ballet, but for less playful adults just moving across the plaza’s different types of decking—wood, perforated metal, and rubber—makes you aware of your steps and the ground beneath your feet. In the original design, a section of the floor was patterned with silver maple leaves.

“It is not an in-between, everyone-is-happy design,” Geuze said. “It is a surprising design, a place that you have never been before, so you are able to say, ‘What is it?’ Some people didn’t get it, but younger people like it and say, ‘Wow, this is our plaza.’ ” In summer, Schouwburgplein now functions as a communal space for soccer games and skateboarders and music festivals. Videos on the Internet show flash-mob performances of “Gangnam Style,” as well as more organized events, with sofas scattered across the expanse and spotlighted by the gantries. “It has very strong imagery if it is raining and it is at night,” Geuze said. “The steel reflects a million lamps, the glare of the city. You can move one of the dinosaur lamps and illuminate your lover if you want, which is seductive.”

Schouwburgplein, for Geuze, is also “self-reflexive,” turning Rotterdam’s notorious charmlessness into a jumping-off point for design. Rotterdam is an industrial city that was all but destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War. The city’s lack of historic context is obviously freeing, and has generated a tremendous quantity of late-twentieth-century architecture that plays off the scale, simplicity, and material of the modernist box and the dockland cranes. Picture-perfect Amsterdam, by contrast, “is a city in a circle,” Geuze said, drawing his arms in close. “For me, it is like Dante’s Hell—I feel I’ll never escape.”

The Netherlands is a country historically at odds with the sea, a natural enemy that it has pushed back with dikes and canals to create farmland and new towns. “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands” the saying goes. In the Netherlands, the desire to make nature orderly and calculable is ever-present, but there is also a wariness, a recognition that the Dutch live in a fragile landscape of extreme contrasts. The name of Geuze’s firm, West 8, refers to extremity. When he set it up, in 1987, he and his partner at the time wanted a name that was short, worked internationally, and was not one of their surnames. In the Netherlands, the big storms usually come from the Atlantic Ocean, from the west. In the old days, when the winds reached a certain speed, the national water board would place people on the dikes to watch for breaches. A heavy storm is a nine or a ten on the Beaufort scale, so the alarm sounds at Beaufort force 8. On the radio, Geuze said, “Literally every month you will hear once, ‘Tomorrow the wind will be West 8.’ ” Geuze has a tendency to reach for natural metaphors. “My profession is like surfing—you have to wait for the wave,” he told me. He describes landscape architecture as being as much about “operations” as it is about design. “I wait, I watch,” he said. As such, Geuze has long been involved with Dutch politics regarding land use, arguing that municipal governments are letting too many buildings encroach on the green edge that he once traversed by bike and by pole. He admires figures like New York’s former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Madrid’s former Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who provided political shortcuts for the extended and often tedious process of making landscape.

Since the founding of West 8, the office has hopscotched around the Rotterdam docklands in search of wide-open spaces for its sixty-five employees. (There are twenty more in New York.) One early office had room for football matches and roller-skating—“That brought a lightness and freedom to the work,” Geuze said. The current one is housed in a nineteen-sixties steel- framed building raised on stilts, which used to contain a customs office. The top floor is the usual open-plan array of desks and pinup boards, but, instead of an architect’s racks of carpet or countertop samples, there are chunks of stone, in every shade of gray, lined up by the long windows.

“Our marriage has been renewed for another season.”

The employees are a multinational group, with English as a common language. In the office one day, Geuze stopped to discuss a design for a boulevard in Moscow with a small team of designers, sketching the proper spacing of trees on the plans. He was then waylaid by a set of serious, black-clad young people with renderings of a tongue-shaped fountain for a private client. He pointed out, gently, that a few options looked a little X-rated for a family home. One floor below, Geuze picked up a model of the walled enclosure at Máximapark, in nearby Utrecht —it’s called “the pergola”—which he was taking me to see that afternoon. The pergola, rendered in wood and fitted into a little carrying case, looked like a classic hexagonal honeycomb—much less interesting than the soft, stretched cells that the project had morphed into.

Geuze used this model to build a prototype in the back yard of his vacation house, in Spain, where he goes with his wife, Jacqueline Blom, who is a well-known actress, and their three children. “I made the hexagons for the first time there, a fifty-foot wall, twelve feet up,” he told me. “The children and I filled the hexagons with rocks, like a drystone wall.” The exercise convinced him that the hexagons needed curves—“If you do miles and miles of hexagons, it starts to look like infrastructure”—and that the pergola could become a way of getting the local community more involved with the building of the park. Children could plant container gardens in the cells, and neighbors could prune climbing vines. Attempts to attract bats and owls and insects could also be made. Only then would adults and children feel as if the landscape were theirs.

The pergola helped solve a design problem at Máximapark: Geuze and West 8 knew that the neighbors in the residential areas around the park wouldn’t countenance a wall, but they felt that the park had to have an edge. The pergola prototype from Spain became a three-and-a-half- kilometre cast-concrete white cellular structure, on legs, that stalks across the landscape like an aqueduct. It also provides the armature for growing vines and feathering nests, as Geuze intended. It is beautiful, if very strange, seen as flashes of white as we drove around the sprawling suburban park. “Children pretend they live there,” Geuze said. “This is the inhabiting-and-sensibility part. The wet feet, the smell of tides, the logic that you can inhabit the tree.”

Máximapark is a great example of the landscape architect as a political operator, not just a designer. After West 8 won the competition for the park, in 1997, the firm decided to concentrate on the design of fifty central hectares of open green space, called the Binnenhof, or courtyard, which would hold classic park elements, like playgrounds, canals, and gardens. The remaining land was allocated for other uses. In the twenty years since—this was a project with many political moments, many waves—a western section has become an archeological museum, housed in a wooden reconstruction of a Roman castellum. A hundred hectares were dedicated to local sports organizations, which built playing fields and practice facilities.

More hectares were donated back to the city, to be sold to housing developers, following the rationale that the park would be safer with a constituency of surrounding homes. But West 8 didn’t cede all control: it designated key building sites “Berlage parcels,” named for Holland’s pioneering modernist architect H. P. Berlage. In a tidy turnabout, architects of houses on those sites have to submit their designs for West 8’s review. Home builders are encouraged to make landmarks that cyclists can navigate by as they cruise the park’s eight-kilometre bike path. One house has a roof that ends in two exaggerated white points; another has a tall brick tower, high above the tree line. The bike path has its own design touch, a centerline marked by white daisies rendered in reflective paint. When the project was named for Holland’s glamorous, Argentine- born Queen Máxima, in 2013, she obviously got it, showing up for the dedication on a bike, in a dress the colors of a varied bouquet of flowers.

The heroic pergola at Máximapark gives that flat site a shape and identity suggestive of a fairy- tale world of flora and fauna that lies just beyond the rows of dark, gable-roofed houses. Alice followed a rabbit, but the architecture does the luring here. Passing through the pergola parallels the journey that you take to get to the Hills at Governors Island: peering through the arch at Liggett Hall. At each of these thresholds, there’s no telling what you might find on the other side. “Governors Island is an island, and you can get to an island only through a journey,” Geuze said. “The island has a notion of being reborn. The island has the philosophical quality of being on the other side.”

R eacting to the scale and the setting of Governors Island, West 8 has made a simpler set of design decisions than those in the European parks I saw. The Hills are the big gesture, Rand everything else—from the curbs drawing you across the ground toward the grove of trees that will one day stand between Liggett Hall and the Statue of Liberty, to the subtle, cutout steel signs, designed by Pentagram—serves that gesture and the superlative views beyond. “Olmsted manipulated the perspective in a way that Americans have the illusion of the wilderness,” Geuze said.“ Park history is related to illusions, and is not far from the realm of poetry and painting. We work from a certain narrative anecdote or feeling. There are other components—functionality, durability, a timeless component—but illusion is where it starts.”

One of West 8’s first recommendations after winning the competition was that the southern part of the island be raised at least fifteen feet. Terms like “sea-level rise” and “resilience,” now familiar to all American coastal cities, were not even in the brief that defined the competition; there was only a reference to “sustainability.” “With us in Holland, Chapter 1 is ‘How did you deal with the water?’ We have been dealing with brackish water for a thousand years,” Geuze said. West 8 convinced Leslie Koch that spending a quarter of the budget to “lift” the park was necessary.

“Any requests?”

OCTOBER 20, 2013

In 2012, when Sandy hit, the new park was under construction, so the Trust of Governors Island moved its construction equipment to the new, higher ground. The island’s historic district lost only eight mature trees. (Prospect Park lost more than three hundred.) West 8 and the New York-based landscape architects Mathews Nielsen, which was hired to develop the planting design, decided to spend that budget on hundreds of spindly young trees, using more than fifty species that were native or adapted to the New York region, rather than on fewer large-specimen trees. They believed that trees that grew up in the island’s salt air and wind would be hardier and longer-lived. They also made sure that the new trees would not grow to obscure the views they had so carefully planned. Governors Island’s existing trees reach only eighty per cent of their species’ potential height, so the new trees’ crowns should top out, twenty years hence, just under the eye line between the top of Outlook Hill and the span of the Brooklyn Bridge.

That particular eye line was one that Koch guarded closely. “Most New Yorkers don’t get to experience that view of the changing skyline,” she said, because access to the tops of most skyscrapers is available only for a fee. In renderings before the project was built, West 8 had shown the island as the center of an asterisk, with lines leading to all the major visual landmarks that surround it. But Geuze had never actually seen that view: the Coast Guard’s eleven-story dormitory, which provided access to the vista, was demolished before he had a chance to visit the top. Every inch of an artificial hill costs tens of thousands of dollars, so two years ago Koch and Geuze went up in a cherry picker to determine how high the tallest hill needed to be. Strapped in and terrified—both are afraid of heights—they inched up in the cherry picker, until, at exactly seventy feet, they glimpsed the full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree reveal over the trees and the roof of Liggett Hall.

The project’s first engineering firm “approached the building of the Hills as if we were building a building,” Jamie Maslyn Larson, West 8’s principal-in-charge for North America, said. The firm suggested that such height would require piles sunken into the soft landfill, as if the designers were, in fact, building a skyscraper. This was both outside the budget and not what West 8 had in mind. A second set of engineers, from the Seattle-based firm Hart Crowser, had experience with landfill, water, and seismic activity from the Olympic Sculpture Park, and, after more than a year of back-and-forth, they helped to create hills that would stand tall, resist erosion, and not be so heavy that they would push the edge of the island—splat—out into the harbor.

Twenty-five per cent of the bulk of the Hills is material recovered from the demolition of the Coast Guard structures and parking lots, including that eleven-story building, whose 2013 implosion can be viewed on YouTube. (It took twenty seconds.) This land-fill forms the Hills’ core, the workhorse base beneath the showstopper elements. To lighten the load on the man- made island, West 8 also called for parts of the tallest hill to be made from pumice, a pale-gray, porous volcanic rock that looks like the surface of a Hollywood moon, drains well, and weighs half as much as regular fill. The fill was covered with horticultural soil, made from five different recipes, engineered to support specific types of turf, plants, and trees. To create steeper inclines, some of the fill was wrapped in geotechnical matting, creating rounded edges that resemble a giant stack of pancakes of diminishing diameter. The steepest, almost vertical slopes were made with wire baskets, stuffed with horticultural soil. Jute mesh, coir logs, and forty-two thousand shrubs help to keep the horticultural soil in place—“the belt and suspenders” of the operation, according to Ellen Cavanagh, the director of planning for the trust.

The final design of the Hills creates a sort of mental push-pull for the visitor: their extreme slopes say “unnatural,” while their soft curves, stone scrambles, and brushy forests tell the body to approach, climb, explore. They don’t look fake, like the Astroturf-covered slopes one sees at new playgrounds, but like an exaggerated version of reality. Geuze built very long slides on Slide Hill, though he was careful to make them blend with the rest of the park, so as not to become a segregated place for families. There is also the Stone Scramble, an assortment of giant blocks that act as a shortcut for the many children who will be too impatient to climb Outlook Hill on the path.

Hidden around the back side of Discovery Hill is a surprise for the adults: the sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. “I was thinking about Walden Pond and that cabin there—a cabin just the right size for one person,” Whiteread said. The sculpture is a concrete cast of the interior of a wooden shack, a modern-day hermitage around which the artist has placed bronze casts of actual trash found on the island, which she made in her studio, in London. After Whiteread was done with the trash—which was considered an archeological find, because it was unearthed in the island’s historic district—she shipped it back, bubble-wrapped, to Governors Island. Eighteenth-century British landscapes often had such buildings dotted about their slopes, styled as temples, grottoes, and Merlinesque cottages. Like Whiteread’s shack, they were designed both to ornament the landscape and to provide a lookout point.

“I had the idea of being holed up there and looking over to the Statue of Liberty and the site of the former World Trade Center,” Whiteread told me. “It is a very loaded place. I didn’t want to spell it out, but I wanted you to have a sense of reverie while standing there and looking out.” Koch says that she had not thought about the relationship between the shack and the skyscrapers until the day the shack was being installed: “Rachel was there in a hard hat, and the sculpture was suspended from a crane as they were putting it into position.” Koch suddenly saw the concrete against the backdrop of lower Manhattan, its rough edges clashing with the crystalline towers. “I said to Rachel it had never occurred to me how it would look against the skyline. She said, ‘It occurred to me.’ ”

“Sometimes it’s important to stop whatever break you’re taking and just do the work.”

FEBRUARY 8, 1999

adrid Río, whose final section will be completed later this year, is like Boston’s Big Dig, New York’s Hudson River Park, and the future plans for the Los Angeles River rolled Minto one six-billion-euro public project. To build it, West 8 and three Spanish architectural offices—Burgos & Garrido, Porras La Casta, and Rubio & A-Sala—jointly won a competition to design the area on top of the M-30 highway, already in the process of being submerged and capped. To see it properly, you have to get on a bike, and so, on a mild day in December, Geuze, Blom, and I rented bicycles at the Matadero, an early-twentieth-century slaughterhouse that’s being transformed into a café, theatre, and galleries. As I looked at the stylish interventions— steel-framed windows, sans-serif signs made out of lightbulbs, buffed concrete floors—it was hard not to dream of proposals for similar makeovers for the historic buildings on Governors Island. We had coffee in a large space outfitted with reclaimed, jewel-colored theatre seats and a vintage bar. A book fair was being held in another space, an art exhibit in a third. I could have stayed all day, and we hadn’t even left the first courtyard.

We set out with Geuze in the lead, cycling upright and one-handed, coat flapping, point-and- shoot camera outstretched, snapping away. It was easy to ride up and down the gentle sloping paths, but you had to pay attention. Kids were everywhere: on a low rise, a pod of tiny children in pastel skates were getting an inline-skating lesson, their legs pumping on their teacher’s command; on a stone-covered hill that was a miniature version of one on Governors Island, a boy shot off the end of a slide into the sand, laughing, while a mother behind him looked nervous as she picked up speed. Geuze and Blom got off their bikes at one of the park’s twenty bridges: a long, flat concrete curve whose underside has been painted with giant red dots. They mounted adjoining one-rope swings attached to the infrastructure, leaning back into the sweep for momentum. It wasn’t clear if the swings were meant to be for adults or for children, but it didn’t really matter. The whole place was a playground, depending on your idea of fun. On the south bank, joggers and Lycra- clad bikers zipped past us, down the Salón de Pinos, which was lined with eight thousand gnarled and windblown “character” pines. (Nurseries across Europe had been depleted.) We biked more slowly past a skate park designed by an architect and skater in West 8’s Rotterdam office, and past a series of oval fountains, vortices, and splash pads that in summer become the playa that Madrid never had.

“It’s not one design but seven different parks, with seven different design logics,” Geuze said. “The first was the boulevard of dancing pines, then one section after another, with a different narrative and identity.” Madrid Río has been described as a linear park that knits together a number of neighborhood parks, and that is exactly right. Lacking Geuze’s excellent balance, I had to keep getting off my bike to take a picture of the next beautiful thing, not a feeling I’ve ever had in a park of similar shape, like the Hudson River Park. Some parts of Madrid Río look sedate, some wild, but the controlled palette of gray granite, green trees, and tan paths already feels settled into the grand design of the city. The space is quiet, despite the brash ambition of both its design and its client. The parts that in photographs looked rather mad—that boulevard paved with marble blossoms, bridges lined with mosaic portraits of Madrileños, the brilliantly planted parterres—provide opportunities to pause and delight in a sprawling composition. Geuze says that experience brings the wisdom to do less: “When I was younger, I would never have been able to keep my hands off.”

The Río is majestic in a way that Governors Island will never be, an Old World version of new landscape ideas, but in New York you can see the same ideas at work: the mixing and sometimes overlapping movement streams of skaters and runners and pedestrians and bikers, the range of activities from hot to chill, the fussy hedges and the love of a soft curb. Our Slide Hill is bigger, they have fancier bridges. Our coffee is weaker, they have streets paved in flowers. The Statue of Liberty is still the trump card. Madrid Río is largely an internal experience, travelling through and looking at the landscape that the design team created; Governors Island doesn’t need to do as much, because the site came with so much more, gratis—its location in New York Harbor.

The park wouldn’t hold people’s interest if it were only for selfies with the Statue of Liberty. There is the promenade around the island’s rim, which can be walked or cycled; the “hide and reveal” approach to the same horizon from within the park, as you follow the curving paths and the corridors that line up your view, in the Baroque manner, with landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge or Ellis Island. “We designed different ways to see the world, and together they are perfect,” Geuze said.

overnors Island’s regular ferry was in drydock for its biennial tune-up ahead of the site’s opening, on Memorial Day, so the vessel that picked up a dozen families for a test run at Gthe Hills was a party boat: a blue-glass, L.E.D.-lit dance floor, and a top deck with café chairs and tables. It seemed right for a day off, with babysitters, parents, and offspring sprung from their desks and playdates. One set of kids pressed their noses to the window, pointing out the steady stream of helicopters rising from the downtown-Manhattan heliport, while others went to the top deck to take in the view. When the boat reached the island, the pack took off on the long walk from the pier, in strollers, on scooters, on bikes. “Where’s your helmet?” one mother asked, glancing at her spouse.

“She thinks it’s a touchscreen.”

JANUARY 28, 2013

The group swept around the west side of the island, passing between one end of Liggett Hall and a school. Beyond those buildings, the island opened up, with no structures except for a restroom trailer. Before us was the Statue of Liberty, same as she ever was, and something new: a tall, tan hill, terraced like a ziggurat, with a rockfall zagging down the north side. “Jonas, we are going to have to climb a mountain today,” my eight-year-old remarked to his best friend. As we walked closer, the fall resolved itself into large, Minecraft-like chunks, a frozen river of patinated granite recycled from the island’s seawall, tough and gray against the hill’s surface. “Can anyone tell me what this hill is made of?” Koch asked. No one answered. “A building that blew up!” The kids were not impressed—as daughters and sons of architects, some of them had been witnesses to the implosion. “Yes, we blew up a building that was right here,” Koch said. “The rocks you are going to climb on were in the ocean for a hundred years. It’s up to you to tell us if they are tough enough for New York.”

With that, the children were off, the first time that feet under a size 7 had touched the rocks of the Stone Scramble, sorting themselves by size order as they jumped, hopped, and bounced up the hill. In the olden days, one might have reached for a mountain-goat metaphor; today, these kids had probably all taken a class in parkour. Before most of the adults had reached the foot of the hill, the big kids were up top, standing on the rocks that mark the hard-won height of seventy feet, looking across the harbor at Lady Liberty’s face. They could barely be persuaded to pose for a photo before they were down, up, down again. An older child ran up, panting: “Vera found a wobbly rock!”

The adults were more inclined to linger up top, looking not just west but north and east and south, mentally checking off all the landmarks: the panoramic sweep takes in One World Trade Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Verrazano; closer in are the slides, the picnic grounds with gatherings of more rock seats, and the Whiteread concrete cabin. No one wanted to call the kids’ attention to Slide Hill, which was off-limits until the matting required for a soft landing was installed, but the slides did look fun, stainless-steel beds angling across the lower slope, interspersed with Jenga-like constructions of climbable wooden logs. When the toddlers started digging in the dirt of what will soon be a grassy apron in front of the Hills’ high spot, it was time to leave. We walked down the hill with regret, back to the flats. Koch noted with satisfaction the kids running along the curbs. She wished that she could find the woman who had come up to her after one of the first planning workshops, in 2008, and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone, but I let my kids run free here.”

It isn’t just children who need opportunities to run free. New York Harbor offered Geuze a grand borrowed landscape, and a ferry ride that sets this park off from all the others in the city. “There’s no doubt that mass culture has a hundred-per-cent success in making the world programmed,” he told me. “Everything is branded, everything has a name, has a function that you have paid for. That makes a very relevant question for our generation of designers. If we are interfering in public space, should we be part of that, or should we offer a sort of antidote?” His answer, in this spot, is clear: “Maybe we should make an environment where everyone can enjoy the lightness, and you can play.” ♦

ALEXANDRA LANGE