Archinect - News

Field Operations completes North Park transformation at Freshkills Park, once world's largest landfill

2023-10-17T17:24:00-04:00

Field Operations has shared photos of their completed work on the first phase of North Park at the Freshkills Park redevelopment project for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

Over the course of 30 years, what was once the world’s largest landfill will become an interconnected series of parks and open spaces spread across 750 acres on the west side of Staten Island, beginning with the newly inaugurated 21-acre segment. A pathway carved into a gently curving earthwork arc guides visitors from a new entry approach around the base of the northernmost landfill mounds, culminating in an overlook that offers views of the Main Creek wetlands and William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. Costs for the project have been reported at $21 million.

Image: NYC Parks/Malcolm Pinckney

Visitors entering from Wild Avenue will encounter an arrangement of flowering ground swales leading northeast to a sumac-lined plateau and picnic lawn. There, a bird tower set against the water’s edge dominate...

Is your city running out of space? Hong Kong says: Just build more land

2019-07-25T07:23:00-04:00

Under the ambitious “Lantau Tomorrow” plan, Hong Kong will first build a roughly 2,500-acre island—roughly the size of 1,000 football fields—around the uninhabited Kau Yi Chau Island to the northeast of Lantau. This may be followed by an additional 1,700 additional acres of land reclamation around the island Hei Ling Chau, which is roughly two miles from Mui Wo and visible from its shoreline.

CityLab reports that under a new aggressive urban growth plan, Hong Kong will create a pair of new islands totaling over 3,200 acres in area in order to create new high-density urban neighborhoods.

Record-breaking affordability issues on the island have pushed wait times for public housing passed the half-decade mark, while by certain estimates, CityLab reports, the average Hong Konger must wait 25 years to be able to afford to purchase an apartment in what is currently the world's most expensive real estate market.

Under the Lantau Tomorrow plan, CityLab reports, the city could provide between 150,000 and 260,000 new housing units with up to 70-percent of those homes earmarked as public housing.

As Singapore grows from the sea, its heritage continues to shrink

2018-03-12T14:38:00-04:00

Short on space, the city-state has since its independence been reclaiming land to build the nation and to rewrite 'unhygienic' episodes of its history.

In his essay for Failed Architecture, William Jamieson, a PhD candidate in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, takes a look at Singapore's monumental land reclamation efforts since 1965, the ecological, urban, and cultural implications, and the inevitable erasing of heritage.

"Singapore sees itself as chronically undersized," Jamieson writes. "It imagines itself as a larger country, and works backwards: materialising the necessary geographical puzzle pieces to suit the demands of the global economy as much as to satiate its own needs. Space is not merely flexible, but hypothetical."

Building New York City's sixth borough

2015-08-18T11:40:00-04:00

If it is possible, financially and technologically, to build a three-acre park in the river west of New York City, then why isn’t it possible to construct an artificial island at a higher elevation than downtown Manhattan that would serve as New York City’s sixth borough? Many of the city’s problems—real estate prices, developers purchasing blocks at a time, the astronomical cost of parking a car, or even a bicycle, even shoreline erosion—are problems of space. So why not just build more space?