Architecture as Interface:

Roosevelt Park stands as a threshold or interface between four diverse and unique neighborhoods; Lower East Side, ChinaTown, SoHo and the East Village.  Belonging to all, yet accommodating none, the current site acts more like a public boundary than a park or gathering place.  One of the goals of this project was to recalibrate the park's current program into an acceptor rather than a repeller by surveilling the programmatic conditions and responding to the gaps or interfaces found between them.

The interface regulates, mediates and concentrates the public's experience in order to create zones of perception both from the interior of the park as well as from the exterior.

GROUNDSCAPE::

Select materials and architectural attributes punctuate, divide and/or expose in order to achieve varying degrees of permeability, transparency and perceptual layering.

Access and customize a host of event information, media systems atmospheric settings and services in order to exercise choice in order to personalize the environment.

Spatial design and media systems contribute to the group dynamic of the setting and encourage engagement, conversation and connections locally as well as globally or virtually.

The groundscape is transformed from a surface to a thickened field of superimposed scales of time and distance both physically and virtually.  Physical constructs define virtual fields in this ever growing mobile society.

ROOFSCAPE::

By turning the park upsidedown, the new public landscape is lifted out of the canyon of its local domain and opened up to extend visually across all four neighborhoods.  It is at this point that the park occupies a secondary visual field unlike that of the groundscape.  This visual expansion virtualizes the park experience and provides access to another New York previously only accessible by its inhabitants.  The "Tar Beach" as its known to locals becomes the new greenspace.