URBAN COLALGE

The necessity to reshape the new East River Esplanade becomes the occasion to bring out a new prospective for this portion of the City.

The intent is to value the new waterfront not as an isolate and independent element, nor as a “design” object, but as a strategical project able to react to its surroundings, thus able to generate urban qualities which are not always obvious (or present).

The complexity of the surrounding context brought to the development of a “per parts” project; a series of areas/surfaces that will work transversally (in the east-west direction) to the north-south line of the waterfront, generating a sequence of always different situations and relations with the public space, promoting urban transformations at the neighborhood scale.

The long line of the waterfront is thus developed as a set of linked segments, able to enrich the unity of the new Esplanade, along which all of the principal urban services are lined up.

The “transversality” then  becomes the founding strategy of a project able to revalue the coast line as the backbone spine of a system that goes from the consolidated city, in the west side, up to the Roosevelt Island and punctually up to the Queens River Side. This project strategy will allow punctual “detachments” from the FDR Drive’s line, generating new water relations throughout docks, piers, pedestrian bridges, beaches, sports fields and a sequences of services that will reshape, in a qualitative way, this city portion.