 Good evening everyone. I'm Kara McCarty. I'm the curatorial director of Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and I'm thrilled to see all of you here this evening. Cooper Hewitt's purpose is to inspire, educate, and empower people through design. And we do this through our education programs, publications, our online content and discussions, our wonderful education programs, as well as our National Design Awards. Design Talks, which is generously funded by Adobe Foundation, makes possible this wonderful series that we've started that focuses on a lot of contemporary design issues and highlights many of today's design practitioners, including awardees of the National Design Award. Next month, the final talk for this season will be the interior design firm, Adeland Darling Design from San Francisco, who will discuss their designs and the philosophy of incorporating senses and addressing senses in their designs. For tonight's event, please check out our website. We are being live streamed, and after tonight's program, one can watch this program again on our, on Cooper Hewitt's website. As many of you know, Cooper Hewitt is undergoing a major renovation. We've been closed the past couple of years, but it's very exciting. At the end of this year, we are planning a major reopening. As part of this renovation, we're gaining 60% more gallery space, a much needed restoration of the historic mansion. And we are also, it was an opportunity to completely reevaluate and reimagine what a new Cooper Hewitt could be, as well as the 21st Century Design Museum could be. In late fall this year, we will celebrate the opening, and I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot more about that. Tonight, we are delighted to welcome two National Design Award winners, Landscape Architect Margie Ruddock and Design Patron Award winner, Jeanette Sadek-Kahn. Margie Ruddock is recognized for her pioneering environmental approach to urban landscape design, and has been called the Landscape Design icon by Dwell Magazine. Ruddock fosters the idea of nature in the city through projects like New York's Queens Plaza and Trenton Capital Park on the Delaware River. Ruddock's international work includes the Shalim Retreat in India and the Living Water Park, the first ecological park in China. Margie's forthcoming book is entitled, Wild by Design. Jeanette Sadek-Kahn, Commissioner of New York City Department of Transportation from 2007 to 2013 spearheaded the redesign of some of New York's most iconic sites from pedestrian plazas to the rollout of bicycle sharing program. In her new role as principal at Bloomberg Associates, Jeanette and her team will work with a global consulting firm to help improve the quality of life for citizens around the world. I'd like to mention that the Design Patron Award is not something that is decided upon by the jurors for the National Design Award. It is an award that is determined by the museum and is given to an individual in recognition of outstanding support and patronage within the design community. The Design Patron Award acknowledges how Jeanette's incredible initiative has changed the way New Yorkers travel about and interact in the city. And in fact, I've noticed right outside the studio here, I'm looking at one of her park benches. A little bit about tonight's program and then we'll jump in and get started. Our two speakers will give presentations of their work. Then the three of us will come up here, have a conversation, but throughout we would love to encourage questions from the audience. And there will be two microphones here at either aisle. And if you would like to pose a question, please come up to the microphone and we'll be happy to call on you. So thank you very much. Our first speaker is Jeanette Sadek-Kahn. Well, thank you, Kara. It is great to be here. And many of you have seen a lot of the recent work that we've done on New York City streets. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of that work. Walking around the streets of New York today, you see a variety of designs that you didn't see a few years ago. And hopefully we'll be able to see some of them. There is a bench outside, as was mentioned. There's a bike lane out there as well. But yeah, maybe I can just mime the changes. But many of you know, you see pedestrian islands, you see bike share stations, you see bike lanes, you see pedestrian countdown clocks. There's really a new vocabulary that's out there that people use when they're walking around New York City streets. And it's very different from the old vocabulary. There we go. The 21st century designs really focused on moving people as quickly as possible from point A to point B. And to a large degree, missed all of the other ways that a street was used. And you can really see this in this design for Times Square in the 1950s. No. There we go. So that's Times Square in the 1950s. You can see it in the design for Grand Army Plaza, which this is in the 1920s. Oh, okay. Next slide. Okay. I think this approach was really epitomized in the Futurama exhibit in the World Fair, which was in 1939. And what do you see, what is missing from all of these images? People. Exactly. Next slide. I'm going to go like this and that's next slide. So people, you know, streets are some of the most valuable assets that a city has. But our streets have not been designed for people. And somehow all the dysfunction on New York City streets has evolved into this kind of acceptance, right? We sort of accept what's out there on city streets. We become used to the notion of streets out of balance. And the design of a street will largely tell you what to do. The design of this street clearly tells you to shelter in place. The design of this street says free parking. And this one is like a tarmac, you know? It's a message that says either, you know, get ready for takeoff, gentlemen, start your engines. This one, okay. This one says anything goes. Yeah, there was that one. It's working, okay. So, okay. Anything goes. This one clearly says bike at your own risk. A street can also highlight what's largely missing. What's missing here would be a sidewalk, a crosswalk, a bus stop. And, you know, when you think about it, New York is known as this great walking city, right? But what we found when we did some surveys is there's just, there's no place to sit down. It's like an oxymoron, right? And so we have actually got lots of experience building parking spaces. But we don't have much experience building spaces for people to sit down. And Mayor Bloomberg's plan YC changed that. And while administrations tend to think in four-year terms and business as usual, Mayor Bloomberg took the long view. He recognized that we needed to make course corrections along the way so that when we opened the door in 2030 with a million more people here, he recognized what we saw. And he wanted to improve the quality of life in communities and build a much greener city. And this had profound implications for the design of New York City streets and one that demanded a different approach. And so we prioritized sustainable mobility, making it easier for people to get around by bus and by bike, created pedestrian plazas in areas for people to really take in the city and created safer streets for people walking on foot. So we really took this big picture view of our streets and we addressed a wide range of issues. You know, we can build streets that are safer, that are more accessible, that are attractive to people, that accommodate all users, and it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating a complete street. So we turned this free parking street into a plaza that's become an anchor for the community, an anchor for business. In fact, in the three years since we installed this plaza, retail sales went up 173%, twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood. You remember the slide of Times Square? It looked virtually the same up until 2009. And we just recently cut the ribbon on the permanent Times Square. We did this in December with somewhat of a rainy day, as you can see. But it is finally a quality open space that is really worthy of its name as the crossroads of the world. And it's important to note that all of these projects, you know, you see them lined out in temporary materials, you know, with planters and paint and tables and chairs. But all of the plazas go through the traditional construction process with high-quality materials and high-quality designs. But if we had started with just presenting Times Square through computer models and visualizations, we would still be talking about it. You know, this notion of moving quickly to change your streets really up until Mayor Bloomberg's tenure was largely an imaginative thought. So you see these plazas now all over town and all neighborhoods in some phase, or over 60 right now, in some phase of planning, design, or construction. And we brought the same approach to our sidewalks. You can see this is a barren strip of concrete on the Upper West Side. And now it's a well-used place by the community, and we've designed in benches, and there's green infrastructure up there. There are bioswells. And you can see these benches, these beautiful benches all over the city. There are request-based, so people request these benches, and we put them in. We prioritize them in areas where there's a high volume of pedestrians, particularly focusing on areas with a high concentration of seniors who often need to take a load off. We have put along with everybody else. We've put in almost 900 of these to date. We also took the same approach in looking at the opportunities to repurpose our underutilized asphalt. And so you can see here we took this street, which was along a major transit corridor, and repurposed it, created one of our first select bus service routes. New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America, and it has the slowest bus speeds, eight miles an hour. As you probably know, you can walk across town faster than taking the bus. And my traffic commissioner used to say that the only way to get across town was to be born there. So that is really not the mark of a world-class city. So we brought this approach to all five boroughs, and you can see them all over town, those beautiful red painted lanes. Buses move 20% faster, 20% increase in ridership on all of the routes, the only bus routes that have an increase in ridership across the city. We also took streets that were basically runways for speeding, especially late at night, and turned them into leafy neighborhoods, residential streets. We built in bike lanes, we built in the green medians, narrowed the street on the right-hand side, and put in a good traffic calming there. And we brought this approach to Grand Army Plaza. You can see this was a tidal pool of traffic, and it became this pedestrian and bike gateway to Prospect Park that is much safer and much more attractive. This gives you a sense of the kind of scale of traffic calming strategies that we've implemented all over the city. And it's not just in the traffic calming strategies. You can also see this as a result of our investment in our bike network. You can see here we put down pedestrian islands, which actually anchor all of our protected bike lanes, and they pay big dividends. People know where to stand. They're much more predictable streets. And we worked really, really hard to implement an interconnected network. So this is the network in 2007, and this is the network in 2013. It may be hard to see. I like doing this. I could do this all day. It looks so easy. We just draw the lines on the map, and there we go with no issue whatsoever. But we built about 400 miles of this network. We created key connections to the bridges, created the first parking protected bike lane, new design, and then we augmented that bike backbone with a new bike share system. How many of you have used the bike share system? Great. Well, then you know, we've got 6,000 bikes. We've got 330 stations. We delivered it quickly. In just 11 months, people have taken 7 million rides, and they've ridden nearly 14 million miles. That's the equivalent of 550 miles around the earth. I don't know what it is in terms of calories spent and pints of cherry Garcia consumed, but it's a lot. So it's got that health dividend as well for people that can just use it quickly to get their errands done. Enhancing the form and function of our streets also included our newly designed bike racks, which was selected through a design competition thanks to the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, National Design Museum, who hosted the competition. And with these new designs, we have them installed all over the city. And now 20,000 bike racks on the streets of New York. And we also used this design when we were moving from single space meters to muni meters. And instead of having to worry about taking out the pole and filling the hole with concrete, we just pulled the head off the meter and looped on the new bike rack loop design. And voila, we had a new bike rack on the old poles. So many of you have probably gone through the frustration of trying to interpret what a parking sign actually says. And so our traffic sign used to look like these totem poles that you see on the left. They were four collars. You know, they were all in caps. They were like screaming at you, but you just couldn't figure out what they said. You really kind of needed a PhD and DOT to kind of figure out what was said. But you can see on the right, we simplified it, created new design. Easy to read, you know, two collars. You can see what's there. And it was thanks to a lot of hard work from the design team at Pentagram that we were delivering these new designs to the streets of New York. We also took street design to zen-like levels with this curbside haiku. And we have these profound safety messages with this 575-syllable structure. And you can see these all over the city. They were created by John Morse. We created them in a way so that people could just discover them, you know, as they're walking across the street. We also created a system of signage for pedestrians, which was a revolutionary thought. You know, when you think about it, we've got a great system of signs for cars, but not a lot of signage for pedestrians. And we also did a survey. And we found that, at any given time, 10% of New Yorkers are lost. And that's just the 10% that we'll admit it. So we clearly had the need for a pedestrian signage system. So we developed an easy-to-read system. It's got all the landmarks, transit stops on there along. You can see the yellow line. There's a radius, which tells you five minutes, you know, what's within a five-minute walk, what's in a 20-minute ride. And we also installed them. You can see on the right, we installed them on the Select Bus Service Route on Neustern Avenue. And that's Tom Prenogas from the MTA. He's been an incredible partner at the MTA with Mike Bloomberg when we were launching our last SBS route at the end of last year. I think the lesson from all of this is to follow the people. And by tracing their lines, the way they walk through the city, you can design new and better ways of getting around. You can see this in Midtown. This was a mid-block crossing from 51st to 57th Street. People would, you know, constantly walk mid-block to get to the public areas there. So we knit them together and, you know, follow the design lines of the, of the desire lines of the pedestrians on the street at 6.5 Avenue, which captured the fancy of many. And it really went a long way to addressing the informal but dangerous conditions that had been there for decades. And sometimes, you know, improving the function and attractiveness of a street doesn't require asphalt and it doesn't require paint. It just requires, you know, opening it up to people. This is during our Summer Streets program where we close Park Avenue to cars from the Brooklyn Bridge to 72nd Street on select Saturdays in August. A huge number of people, 25,000 people, I think, a weekend. And, you know, it allows you to do things like see your city in a whole new way. You can see Grand Central Terminal without getting worried about getting run over. We also repurposed some of our assets there. The Park Avenue Tunnel, as you know, goes underneath Park Avenue. We opened up the tunnel for the first time in almost 100 years and people could enjoy it, walk through, created the sound and light installation thanks to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. And, you know, people could see the space instead of, you know, honking and fumes. And when you think about it with over 6,000 miles of streets and 12,000 miles of sidewalks, New York City has won huge canvas. And this large gallery is actually run by the first DOT Commissioner for Art and Urban Design, Wendy Foyer, who I believe is in the back. Wendy? No? Wendy is in the back. Raise your hand. Wendy Foyer, who has done so much to transform the streets of New York and bringing art to neighborhoods all across the city. You can see this here. This is a piece by Carl Lynch. This, again, is that free parking plaza. This is a great art installation by David Ellis. This is a piece and justice mural by Shepard Ferry at the Manhattan Bridge. Easter eggs at the gateway to the Staten Island Ferry. We look at our own facilities. This is part of a bridge facility fence underneath the Manhattan Bridge. We took a new look at the ubiquitous New Jersey, the Jersey barriers that you see everywhere and used local artists to transform those transition spaces. This is a yellow swoosh on Fourth Avenue. This is a really fanciful David. A red hoop in Union Square. A very cool light installation that we did on the Manhattan Bridge. We also enlisted kids to participate in community groups to participate in all of these projects. You can see the stenciling they're doing here and you can see the result, which is great, the flooring for one of our bike share stations, a really great gateway energizes the neighborhood. We also did a design competition for our streets. This is in Times Square when it was the temporary materials. This is Molly Dilworth. What she did was she took a NASA heat signature map of Times Square and translated it into colors and then laid it down in Times Square. It looked like this beautiful river. All of this added up to streets. It's not just beautifully designed streets and streets that work better and that's a green, crunchy thing. These designs led to streets that were safer, that work better for business, that just allowed much more mobility. When you think about it, the streets of New York had been in suspended animation for decades. It was like they couldn't be changed. What I think we were able to show with these new designs is that it's possible to change the streets of a city. We codified all of these changes, so these weren't just one-off projects in a new street design manual that was the work of 11 city agencies coming together over a couple of year period of time. Not the sexiest project, but one of the most important projects that was delivered because it actually changed the DNA of New York City streets. It doesn't depend on who's the transportation commissioner. It doesn't depend on who the mayor of the city of New York is. This is the playbook for New York City streets going forward. We also work with NACTO to take this approach and bring it to other cities with an urban street design guide and an urban bikeway design guide. The changes that you see on New York City streets have seen changes all over the country. When you think about it, the design guides that have been used are really 50 years old. The MUTCD, the Ash Toe Design Guides, the Green Guides, they're 50 years old and they're designed for interstates, really designing streets for people to get from Iowa to Ohio. But this provided a permission slip for cities to innovate because they had a new guidebook to point to to say, no, this is an authorized design. So it's had a huge impact. This is a new plaza in Silver Lake in Los Angeles. This is a new parking protected lane in Portland, Oregon. This is a new 20-mile-an-hour residential zone in Mexico City. So well-designed streets are really, they're not luxuries and nice to have. And they really don't need to come at the expense of other modes of transportation like the car. This is 1st Avenue today. And not long ago, it looked like this. So you can design your streets differently. You can bring in mobility. You can bring in safety. You can make them attractive. You need to design right up front. Designing for peds and bikes and buses shouldn't be from leftover materials. It should really be designed in the front end. And that's how you create world-class streets and that's how you create a world-class city. It doesn't take decades. It doesn't take millions. It takes vision. It takes political leadership and courage. And it takes the energy of communities all across the city to make it happen. And we need streets that are as dynamic as the people who live here. So thank you. Thank you. That was fantastic. A big overview of the whole city. I'm actually going to be talking about a very specific project to look at it from start to finish. This big tangle of metal and asphalt that was Queen's Plaza until fairly recently. It was just a morass of the conditions I think Jeanette was talking about. It's a very critical point. It's kind of the gateway between Manhattan and Queen's and Long Island City. It also has eight different subway stops and bus lanes. So it's really a transit hub and it was possibly the fourth new commercial hub for the city. But it was really a wreck and very dangerous and had some very, very difficult conditions. I think many of which we just saw, including just this acres of asphalt. This is the project site with a park at the top end of it and then a streetscape taking the streets all the way down to the Queensborough Bridge. It was quite dangerous and also not only was it cluttered. You saw it was just kind of a visual mess but also it was really polluted, a lot of pollution from buses and cars. It was also really noisy. The seven line curves around the space and makes this high pitched, horrible sound that was referred to as the screech. So in order to deal with all of these adverse conditions, Department of City Planning and EDC in 2004 launched the Queens Plaza Bicycle and Pedestrian Landscape Improvement Project that was intended to reinvent Queens Plaza as a place that would be attractive. It would be a place where people would want to work. They would want to live. And how did they do this? Well, when we first started to do these images once we'd done the design, these ideas that I think Jeanette was talking about, they were fairly radical. This was before 2007 and Jeanette got on the job and started to steal traffic lanes. But the idea that you could actually take away traffic lanes had not been formalized. The idea that you could have a green lush landscape that was part of the urban infrastructure was not really mainstream. It was kind of fringe. The idea of rain gardens and sustainable urban drainage and permeable behaving, this was not in the kind of current common parlance of landscape design. But now it's 2014. All of these projects have happened. Queens Plaza is finished. This is the mainstream, the idea that urban infrastructure can actually be beautiful, be a park, have transit running through it, pedestrians, bicyclists. It can also operate ecologically, this park filters all of the storm water and cleanses it. So the idea that this actually can be reality is actually mainstream now. You see in most of the landscape architecture magazines and projects like this where urban infrastructure is not something bad, it's an opportunity and it can be something really beautiful. And the goals are very simple. You know, the goals, I think Jeanette was talking about just humanizing infrastructure. The infrastructure is often so daunting and the scale is so huge and just making it a place that people can actually occupy and also making these places safer. They were often very dangerous. Queens Plaza had many fatalities year after year. People just trying to cross the street from north to south and like 12 to 14 lanes of traffic. And then also there was just the perceived safety, not the actual danger of crossing the street, but just the idea that these under spaces, there were strip clubs all along the south end, Bikers Island prisoners were dropped off in the middle of the night with, you know, $3 and it was just perceived as a place that was not safe. So kind of addressing that. And then also making these places greener, not just greener in terms of more vegetation, but greener in terms of actually having a net positive impact, really making the environment better and not worse. So how do you actually address design here? I think we've looked at all of these different projects that are many, many different kind of, many different approaches. In this case, these projects, this project is unbelievably complex, a huge team, not only urban designers, architects Linda Pollack, I just saw Kmin, and engineers, civil engineers, structural engineers, traffic engineers, lighting designers and this massive team, and you have to have a very strong design process and design hand in order for it not to be a kind of design by committee. So really organizing the process very clearly to run through the studies of the site, developing the actual design language, and then integrating the performance issues. How are you going to clean the water? How are you going to actually make the environment better? Are you going to mitigate flooding, actually make the place cooler? These are all things that need to be integrated into the design and not sort of afterthoughts and not thought of as a sort of sustainable component, but actually completely part of the design process. So how do you actually imagine these places and visualize them? I think we saw some really great visualizations. And in this case, this is actually Trenton, the capital parks. You can actually see, the reason I'm showing this is it's so clear, Queens Plaza is very hard to image. This is so clear when you see all of the elevated highway and the acres and acres of parking that was Trenton, New Jersey, from the state house down to the river. And we won the competition to kind of rethink the whole downtown. And not just to make it a park, but to make it a park that actually functions as infrastructure, a new road moving inboard, all sorts of issues of bulkheads and old spans being reused and bridges running across it. So it's not just a park, it operates on many, many different levels. All of these projects need to operate on many different levels at once. So they're not just doing one thing. And that's why they're amazing projects, but it's also why they're difficult to do. So in the case of Trenton, it has to function as a streetscape, it has to function as a park, it has to function as a waterway. These are all similar to the Queens Plaza. It also has to restore a lot of connections that have been broken, connections between neighborhoods, connections between the city and the river. And also the connections between the modes of transport that have been so siloed that they've been thought of as very, very distinct segregated ways of moving. And so this project was trying to redress that. And here Queens Plaza was just this huge tangle. How do we actually start to approach the design of the project? And the obvious way we started to study the site, this drawing by Sandro, Marpillero and Linda Pollack shows how intensely, this is actually the final design, but it shows how intensely they studied. And we all studied the actual structure of the elevated trains and the bridge and the crosswalks. So designing projects like this, you do not do this at your office desk. You have to be there on the site and you have to internalize these really complex conditions. So this was the first sort of ideogram that we did, because at the same time that you're doing all the studies, you have to have a kind of a vision. And these are not design sort of proposals, but what they are is kind of visual prompts. How do you start to develop a design language that's going to take you into the design of this place? So this is like a prompt to the team. We want to, of what the design intent was, we want to integrate infrastructure and possible production of energy and deal with the acoustics and the horrible noises and sounds. We want to reconnect a lot of the site. We also want to just start to integrate the kind of media that we use, plants and water and light. So this is a sort of visual prompt that then we went into the project more deeply and started to develop a real vocabulary saying we want to raise the grade in a lot of places to buffer the sound from the roadbed. So we just said, okay, we're going to berm up in places. We're going to create a kind of a blue ribbon so water can flow through the site, get cleansed as it goes. We want to sort of green the infrastructure. We want to create sort of filtering of planting. So this was still abstract, but getting a little more real. And then finally, the final project, and this is the plan showing the entire site from Dutch Kills Green, plus acre site down through all the medians toward the Queensboro Bridge. The final product, the final design is very green and very lush. A little more lush than you saw in that earlier diagram. And there were many reasons for this, but one of the big reasons was Amanda Burden. And she took a look at all of our studies and said, you know, this place really needs to be a refuge. It needs to be a green, lush place where people can find respite from the chaos that's all around us. So we actually were kind of given license to do something that was much lusher than what would have been normally acceptable. And that was the kind of leadership to say, you know what, this isn't normal that you would be told to design something that's going to be maybe a little higher maintenance, a little less defensible in terms of space, but it needs to be really dense and lush. So the actual plantings are very layered. When you go into the park, it feels, although it's porous, there are no real boundaries around it, it feels very immersive. You kind of disappear into these layers of planting. And something really interesting happened with the acoustics. We had been told by the acoustical engineer that there was really very little we could do about the noise, because we didn't have the big distance for planting, you know, 100 feet to buffer the noise. We couldn't grade up. So we thought, okay, well, we're still going to make it very dense and very lush. And the Landscape Foundation did a study last year and they found that we actually reduced the plantings and all of the work actually reduced the noise level by about 23%, which is almost a quarter. And it goes from decibels in the 80s, which is like unlivable to the 70s, which is like one of the Broadway streets where it's a street, but you actually can tolerate it. And the plantings have ended up being like sponges. You know, plantings can absorb water, filter water, pollution, but in this case they also really absorb noise in a way that wasn't predicted by the engineers. So this guy, you know, he's sitting right underneath the Elevated. You can see the cabs, the cut through the the park that the road goes through. That is about 30 feet away from him. He doesn't seem to notice. There's a big arc of horn beams that kind of buffer that area. There's the constructed wetland that runs through that filters all of the water is right alongside him. So there are so many different layers of landscape between him and this big infrastructure that he doesn't seem to notice that much. And then also it's a real magnet for people for gatherings. Even though there's the train and there's all this sort of noise around it people seem to feel that it's a haven. They have meetings there, they have performances and people really gather there and they seem to think of it as a very a sort of a haven like space. So once you leave the kind of quote park how do you actually turn the design inside out and start to deal with the streetscape where there's no real boundary between quote park and street and we actually had to look at the flows through the through the site, the flows of vegetation, the flows of pedestrians and bicyclists and cars and buses and all the furnishings going through the site and to develop a design language that intersects with the language of DOT the striping. So the graphic here was developed so that there wouldn't be any kind of boundary between what was the street and what was the park and I think that the language of it in terms of design really gives you a sense that the entire street is the public realm, that there is no place where you actually are prohibited from being. And you know where the infrastructure used to be a barrier so that it really cut off various neighborhoods and it was a very prohibitive thing. Now the new infrastructure with that old elevated becomes a conduit to move people and bicyclists through the city more easily. So the infrastructure itself, this is the one part of the project that hasn't happened yet, how to transform the structures and I'm going to talk a little bit about the agencies, all the different agencies involved in these projects and this is the one thing, Jeanette was talking about leadership, this is the one thing that hasn't really happened yet which is all of these different portions of the site are actually controlled by different agencies so the MTA control is the elevated. So in this era when we were designing this we couldn't actually get permission to attach things or touch the structure, they were painting it, but Marpiliuropolec did this beautiful study of the structure and found that whereas you see that this just looks like chaos and you can't tell what's what they actually found that there were these volumes in the structure and if you actually wrapped a scrim inside and lit it you would have this landscape that's sort of like this hanging lanterns and not only is it really beautiful but it also improves way finding because it starts to make distinctions between gaps where you can walk and the volumes so it actually increases navigability of the site. So that hasn't happened yet but you can see what it would do this is at night Lenny Schwendinger was the lighting designer and you can see this kind of black hole where the elevated is but this is what it would look like once this project happens. All the projects that I think Jeanette was talking about and that we deal with in the city have a very, very critical issue in terms of scale. The scale of this infrastructure is so big that it's very hard to kind of address it and meet it and kind of stand up to it when you're designing the landscape and in this design that we did where the planting is very detailed very lush and kind of soft and it looks here fairly soft the actual structure of the landscape is quite big and tough. This is Long Island City it has an industrial history and we wanted to do something that was in keeping with that sort of feel and the character of the place so if you look at this is right after construction if you look at the big moves they actually are quite big scale and you need to do something like that just to sort of stand up to the power of this infrastructure so you can see in these images the kind of large swaths broad brush strokes of the landscape to kind of meet the big strokes of the elevated and even in this walkway this is the constructed wetland at the middle that actually filters the water from the park the walkway through it we had to size so it actually felt like it was part of the city so you weren't making like a little walkway and we wanted this to feel as if it's urban and this image you can see where that pathway intersects the boardwalk we wanted it to feel like it's part of Long Island City so when you're looking at the buildings you actually can connect the two and it really feels urban it does not feel like the fake country so once we deal with the big scale we also went to a level of detail that was kind of unusual we worked with Michael Singer the art component into all of the aspects of this all of the design so we designed Marpello Pollock and Michael Singer and our team designed these curves that have a functional reason for being there the water is actually flowing along those curves and into the wetland where the water is being filtered but the curves also keep people from slipping into the wetland so it's very functional but we also wanted a kind of layer of tactile and sort of the idea that there was some hand in this that actually I think seeing all of the art projects that Jeanette was talking about there's something about this as an artifact it's not just a machine and it's not just a sort of environmental project it's actually an artifact in the city and the sort of urban motif the striations really do reflect the whole feel of the infrastructure and of the city and this is the curves where the water flows through the paving is also with the the benches we wanted to kind of create a sense of a very thick ground plane so rather than just having the paving be like a crust on the earth and then the furnishings are kind of strewn on top of it the benches kind of rise up out of the ground plane and out of the paving and you have the sense of this very earth bound ground plane that also can kind of deal with the scale of the place some of the pavers can actually be butted together and they're just a sort of a traditional paving but then they also can be laid with gaps in them you can see here that where there's not a lot of traffic plants will just volunteer or they're planted and so gradually over the years there will be a kind of a greening of this ground plane and of the pavers those striations also actually do something to reduce the heat the shadow in these striations actually lower so it works on many many different levels and then we also were integrating planting in the no-go zones the areas where we did not want people to walk are very dangerous right near that roadway that cuts to the site and we reused the paving from the road bed and from the sidewalks and saved I think something like $400,000 in paving costs but also created something that feels more intentional more like it's sort of an urban garden out of which this infrastructure kind of rises so finally I just wanted to talk for two seconds about the design of performance the design of this environmental system as a little bit of an object lesson in I was talking about agencies and how to actually get these projects done to be really whole we wanted to filter this was the first one of two first pilot projects for the New York City's high performance infrastructure guidelines so it was needed to be a demonstration of how you could really design a whole system that's going to really have an environmental benefit so this is the wetland that runs through the project through the site and we wanted to filter all of the water from the park on the left hand side you can see into this constructed wetland which is where the boardwalk runs through we also wanted to filter all of the stormwater from the street no park had done this in the city before and we felt that it was really important for the park to deal with the filthy water with the trash and the oil that was actually now just going into the sewer system and eventually into our waterways so we could deal with this but we had one problem with this which is that we had this little device that was going to filter out all the particulates and the trash from the street runoff before it goes into those chambers where the water then settles and eventually percolates down and recharges the groundwater really reducing the load of water that goes into the waterways and generally cleansing the water we couldn't actually get any agency involved to take ownership of this and say that they would maintain it we could design it we could actually have it built but we couldn't figure out who was actually going to maintain it and not any fault of any agency you can see when you look at this plan of who owns what in Dutch kills green that DOT controls the streets parks department controls the green space streets controls the street the pathways and the sidewalks DEP controls the gutters and the sewer system and the MTA controls the elevated so when you see this when you see the section you can see where the problem was so DOT is on the right with the purple you can see why would they want to go through DEP property into parks property to maintain something that was going to filter their own water why would DEP want to go into parks property to actually maintain something that's going to be filtering DOT's water that's pretty much out of their control and then why would parks want to maintain something on their property that's going to be filtering water that's completely out of their jurisdiction so it was just a matter of like a hot potato so we kind of despaired a little bit and we sort of realized this probably was not going to happen we were going to filter the water only from the park and let sort of future generations and future parks actually do the heavy lifting of the street polluted water from the street so we kind of gave up but I it was a very bitter pill to swallow and I became something of a pest and it places like New York City green codes task force I would collar people like poor writ here who a lot of you probably know and say you know we're doing this great rewriting of the codes to be green but we have this problem with Queens Plaza and you know he would say he knew all about this kind of thing and did not have the jurisdiction to say okay well we're going to get DEP to take ownership of this so at that level we actually had we done everything we could we couldn't actually get this to happen so the drawings were done it was designed only to handle the water from the park but a year later I just happened to be at a benefit which I don't do very often and who am I sitting next to but Adrian Benipi the parks commissioner and he said how are things going I said thank you but and I just couldn't let it go and so I said we have this little problem we had this problem with Queens Plaza and the terra clean hydrodynamic separator which nobody would actually maintain and he said isn't that something that you just back up to every two years with the truck and you back he knows maintenance Adrian Benipi you just back up to and you vacuum it out every two years and I said yes it is he said well we'll do it at that point it was too late and I just thought oh my god we're talking to all the right people and this just gets to the issue of leadership that these projects can be done Penny Lee started this project 18 years ago Queens Plaza has pushed this project through from the start it's been a kind of a grassroots effort it's been something that the designers have been working on I've been working on it since 2003 so we have all of these different agencies working on it but until the person at the top has the kind of regal fiat to say like Amanda Burden says this has to be a refuge or Jeanette Sadiq Khan says we're going to remove traffic lanes or Adrian Benipi says you know we're going to maintain this against the current practices you're not necessarily going to have a project that's whole this project needed to have that leadership in order to be whole to have the water cycle be whole so all of these different players need to be really at the table in order to make a place that works that works well for the community, works well for the neighborhood works well for the city it works well for our waterways so that for me is the real moral of the story thank you very much thank you very much and brava to both of you it's really impressive to listen to all that you've done in New York City and it really it really underscores for me what we always say at the National Design Museum is the importance of knowing the power of design to change things and the impact that the two of you have made in New York City working with all of your teams and just a few years time is really quite staggering so brava to both of you thank you and it one of the things that came through loud and clear to me as both of you were giving your presentations is how accessible the city is now I think about mobility which is really about ease of movement and accessibility which is about getting to our destination or meeting our needs but when I think now about coupling transportation landscape design and how that's really starting to change making the city much more accessible is starting to change the form of the city is really quite fascinating and I think that you both gave some very poignant examples so while you were just talking about leadership I'd love to just discuss that maybe a little bit more right now because we've been working we've been living the last few years with the Bloomberg Administration who we know Mayor Bloomberg was very supportive of culture design and a lot of very progressive ideas but it's not true as we know of a lot of mayors and in your experience there's the Mayors Institute which has been very effective in this country but how do we how do we help educate other mayors about design well a couple things I think that first of all I think cities are really at the front line of the innovation that's happening and I think they know their streets and the communities know their streets better than anybody else and I think that the strategies that we talked about today Claire and I are they're economic development strategies you are need to have a different approach to your streets in your city if you're going to continue to grow and thrive to continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect that you're going to get a better result is you know it's illogical if not insane and the idea that cities are going to continue to grow so we need to figure out ways to repurpose our infrastructure allocate our assets a little differently to be able to capture that growth and improve the quality of life there and so in cities around the world you're seeing them adopt new strategies for mobility building in bike lanes bike shares now become the mark of a world-class city building in a much stronger pedestrian framework for the city and the work that we've done is started to be replicated in cities across the country the national association of city transportation officials has the 15 largest cities together the transportation commissioners meeting and exchanging information about what works and what doesn't is a great convening forum on the transportation side to actually implement the kind of changes that we're talking about and the reason why I talked about the design guidance being so important is because for so many years for decades the design guidance that cities had to work with was really outdated and so there really wasn't a way for even progressive engineers and planners that wanted to do something differently there were all these overarching concerns about liability and so a lot of the innovations wouldn't be implemented because of the quote-unquote liability concerns so designing a new play book for cities was really important because it did give them the permission slip to say hey it does work here in all these different cities and all these different places that are doing it and so you're starting to see this replicated all around the country and actually all around the world and so cities are sharing you know this information and I love that it's become a sort of global competition of who can be greener right and that's a complete sea change from what we've seen before so and I think that the internet has really helped because you can see very quickly what works you can see the before and afters and that information can be exchanged almost immediately and you can show a street film of summer streets and so show you can close your street and here's what can happen or you can repurpose a street to a plaza and here's what can happen and people can visually understand it without having to go through a very long traditional process so that time to implementation that time to understanding is completely changed and I think it really is a global competition at a time when people and companies can move anywhere and how to is this something online and if it is where can people find this nakto.org is where you go to find the design guide thank you for that both the urban street design guide and the urban bikeway design guide and all of the documents that I referenced this the New York City DOT street design manual that's all on the New York City DOT website at . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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