Image Credit : Renderings: Courtesy Studio V Architecture
Photographs: Courtesy Bill Anderson, Brett Beyer and Google
Project Overview
Maker Park is a vision that resists the disappearance of Brooklyn’s history and industrial waterfront--reimagining what a 21st century public park should be.
Not yet built, our team is working rapidly to make this design a reality. The community fought for ten years for their park promised in a major re-zoning. New York City finally acquired the remaining site this year. But during that time the neighborhood changed, from an industrial waterfront to one of the most creative communities in the United States: Williamsburg, Brooklyn today is home to remarkable urban culture comprising tech startups, innovative restaurants, craftsmen and artists, and a dynamic residential neighborhood housed within the former industrial waterfront.
Now that history and with its waterfront architecture and industrial artifacts are being wiped away by generic new buildings. The community needs more open space. How can we maintain the authenticity and express the history that made this neighborhood great, pay homage to the working culture of the waterfront, and reflect the creative ethos of contemporary Brooklyn?
A collaborative pro-bono team including Architects, Landscape Architects, Scientists, Environmental Attorneys, Financial Analysts, Remediation Specialists, Lighting Designers, and Graphic Designers has created a new kind of design for a waterfront park.
The team is working with community groups and city agencies to help make the vision a reality, paying homage to the area’s long legacy of manufacturing, and preserving the neighborhood’s culture of collaboration and making that is so central to its 21st century character.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Studio V Architecture: Architect and Planner
Jay Valgora
Daniel Tappe
Matt Horvath
Liwei Wang
Maker Park: Co-founders
Stacey Anderson
Karen Zabarsky
Zac Waldman
Ken Smith Workshop: Landscape Architect
Ken Smith
Sive, Paget & Riesel P.C.: Environmental Attorney
Michael Bogin
Capital Environmental Consultants: Environmental Scientist
Greg Fleischer
Tenen Environmental: Environmental Remediation Specialist
Matthew Carroll
Thornton Tomasetti: Structural Engineer
Eli Gottleib
ARUP: Civil Engineer
Sherazad Mehta
VHB: Environmental Engineer
Brian Murty
BJH Advisors: Economic Analyst
Kei Hayashi
Pentagram: Graphic Identity
Luke Hayman
Simon Blockley
Tillotson Lighting Associates: Lighting Designer
Suzan Tillotson
Scott Baillie-Hinojosa
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips: Government Relations
Katie Schwab
Reggie Thomas
Nadine Johnson Associates: Public Relations
Nadine Johnson
Gia Kuan
Carla Colon
Creative Soldier: Social Media Strategy
Joshua Abehsera
Project Brief
History provides the starting point. Bushwick Inlet was originally a tidal estuary with unique ecology and extensive wildlife. As the waterfront industrialized, historic entrepreneur Charles Pratt built the Astral Oil Works, a progressive energy company, along with the first subsidized worker housing in NYC. He eventually sold his Oil Works and utilized the funds for a higher purpose: founding his namesake school, The Pratt Institute.
This progressive institution educated a remarkable student body including woman and people of color, decades before other institutions, and combined craft and industrial skills with higher education: the first and most egalitarian “maker” university. New companies continued to use the old site for industrial purposes, until it was shut down ten years ago, remaining empty since.
Instead of wiping the site clean or covering it with generic lawns, Maker Park grows from the site’s unique history. Our design dramatically repurposes ten existing steel tanks for new uses: Community Gardens, Performance Spaces, and Art Installations. Removing the tops and selectively creating openings, the tank gardens will house a picnic grove of birches and wildflowers, reflecting pools of water with vines, a performance space with 250 seats, and rocky landscapes featuring with an adventure playground. Surrounding the tanks, berms and grass covered dunes restore habitat and native species.
Our vision provides public green spaces, play areas, gardens and more–a resilient ecological Inlet with native species and community boating, Community Maker Space, and endless potential for collaboration, performance, and installations within the Tank Gardens.
Project Innovation/Need
Maker Park’s design grows from the community’s needs. The team reviewed public input from the rezoning and included every feature the community requested: a lawn, boathouse, gardens, dog run, and playing fields.
Maker Park adds new design features to address the site’s ecology and Greenpoint’s creative culture--the most unusual are a series of majestic oil tanks, and their reinvention as gardens and public spaces. These structures, ranging from four to six stories, are in excellent condition, modified with a series of precise openings, and redesigned as a remarkable series of gardens and public spaces.
One tank houses a picnic grove of birch trees and wildflowers. A second is wrapped with vines encircling reflecting pools. One features a performance space for 300 people. Another reveals a children’s adventure playground, with climbing areas, rock gardens, and slides. Additional tanks feature greenhouses, community gardens, and a viewing platform overlooking the Manhattan skyline.
In addition, the former loft building provides a public maker space administered by a non-profit with tools and workshops for the community.
The Trust for Public Land identified the industrial Brooklyn waterfront as one of the most endangered spaces in America--Maker Park is a vision to address its rapid destruction and reimagine what a public park in the 21st century can be.
Design Challenge
Site Acquisition:
Over a decade ago, the North Brooklyn waterfront was re-zoned for massive residential development in exchange for a major public waterfront park. One of the most desirable neighborhoods in America, Williamsburg, blossomed, yet that success impaired efforts to acquire remaining parkland.
When the City finally acquired the last site in 2017, there was no consensus on design--an outdated ten-year-old plan showed a generic lawn and trees, and ignores the site’s unique topography, history, industrial structures, and ecology. The need for expensive environmental remediation and lawsuits by involved parties threatens to delay and prevent this park from happening.
Public Input:
Through public design charrettes and exhibitions, the team gathered feedback to address the public’s concerns into the design and remedial approach. The design creatively utilizes form of the ten tanks to provide a unique park design with a multitude of different uses and programs, integrated into comprehensive environmental strategies to assure public safety.
Understanding Conditions and Remediation:
We tested the tank’s structural integrity and determined the site’s contaminants, reviewing almost 10,000 technical documents obtained from the Department of Environmental Conservation through Freedom of Information Law requests. We prepared drawings to analyze the tank’s current conditions and determine they are suitable for adaptive reuse. The team developed remediation strategies utilizing video footage from drone flights.
We are now finalizing a Remedial Action Work Plan to present the City and validate reusing the tanks for gardens will get the park built faster, cheaper, safer.
Sustainability
Our design is based on state-of-the-art sustainable principles and innovative approaches to environmental remediation.
Remediation:
Instead of destroying the existing industrial loft building and structures and ripping out the soil, (a “dig and haul” remediation) which releases toxins into the community, oxygen will be introduced while microbes digest petroleum wastes, protected by layers of soil and gardens. Maker Park is currently completing a Remedial Action Work Plan to share with government officials—allowing them to build the park more quickly, less expensively, and more safely. This eliminates the need to remove 20,000 truckloads of contaminated soil through the residential community and allows a less invasive “remediation in place” strategy.
Ecology:
Maker Park also recognizes the pre-industrial past--the inlet’s ecology will reintroduce urban wildlife. Bushwick inlet will be restored as habitat featuring native species. We are collaborating with fellow community activists, the Billion Oyster project, utilizing one tank to breed oyster spat (embryos), restocking NYC’s harbor and native habitat (one outer tank ring can grow 1 million oysters per batch). The tank gardens will collect and treat stormwater preventing discharge to public waterways.
Resiliency:
The typical lawn has been reimagined as a circular space of overlapping grasses, extending out the water and surrounded by a foliated berm that provides informal seating for concerts, and a green barrier to protect the vulnerable neighborhood from future storm events. A dramatic circular dock extends into the inlet supporting waterfront access and community boating.
Urban Design
This award celebrates creativity and innovation in the process of designing and shaping cities, towns and villages, and is about making connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric. Consideration given to giving form, shape and character to groups of buildings, streets and public spaces, transport systems, services and amenities, whole neighbourhoods and districts, and entire cities, to make urban areas functional, attractive and sustainable.
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