DESIGN CHALLENGE:

Grand Army Plaza is New York City’s greatest unrealized asset. Home to fabulous architecture, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch—Brooklyn’s version of the Arc de Triomphe, the elegant Bailey Fountain, the entrance to Frederick Law Olmsted’s greatest park, and a major transit hub, the sum of these parts is today emphatically less than the whole. This competition will generate ideas for the redesign of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, NY. Top submissions will be exhibited in the summer of 2008 at either the Brooklyn Public Library or Brooklyn Museum of Art (TBD). Submissions will also inform the program for a new schematic plan for the Plaza, to be created in late 2008 in partnership with New York City’s Departments of Parks and Recreation and Transportation. Grand Army Plaza was designed by urban planning and landscape architecture masters Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to be Brooklyn’s premier public gathering space. Situated at the convergence of six major arteries and several subordinate streets, Grand Army Plaza must circulate an inordinate amount of motorized traffic. The Plaza’s function as a traffic hub overshadows and impedes use by pedestrians, bicyclists, and the surrounding cultural institutions.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.reinventingGAP.org