The Long Island City shoreline of NYC’s East River was once lined with marshland and farms which were eventually hardened and industrialized. Somehow, basking in the shadow of this world-class skyline, and one subway stop from Grand Central Station, this extraordinary site sat undeveloped leaving its upland working-class community frozen in time without the social, cultural, or open space resources or access to its river. That stasis began to change in 1995 with the city-sponsored Queens West Master Plan, which led to the Gantry Plaza Park waterfront revitalization by Thomas Balsley Associates. This was followed by the completion of Hunters Point South Park, also by SWA/Balsley, and its 7,000 affordable housing component that had been originally planned as the Olympic Village site in NYC’s bid for the games.

This miraculous 25 year transformation was recently exhibited at MoMA and has been held up as a global model for 21st century urban waterfront resiliency, with social, cultural, and environmental equity at its core. The site for this spring’s design studio’s site extends north of this development for a half mile along the riverfront to the Queensboro Bridge; bringing with it your instructor Tom Balsley’s unique perspective of the site and its upland community.

The studio will meet the community representatives, elected officials, municipal agency planners, and prominent landscape architects, urban designers, and architects who will offer insight and participate in the mid-term and final reviews. Working together in teams of two or three, students with diverse perspectives will find common ground and design language, first in collaboration by shaping the urban plan with the public realm strategy and then by parceling portions of those public open spaces for individual design studies that have been informed by the overall plan’s DNA.

We will conduct one week warm-up design exercises that focus on the social and cultural perspective of public open space design–the human-centric focus that strongly determines the success or failure of any given space. This studio will pull the curtain and offer a glimpse into the complexities of designing in the public open space realm, revealing the many design considerations that emerge from the stakeholder outreach, input, and approval process. A two-day visit to LIC will include a tour of the site, the neighborhood, the Queens West Parks to the south, and other areas in NYC that may have relevance to the studio focus.