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Sponge Park

Sponge Park

Gowanus Canal

By (author) Susannah C. Drake

£35.00

Publishing 12th Jun 2023
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    • Introduces New York-based DLANDstudio’s pioneering and award-winning Sponge Park concept for the regeneration of the notorious Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY, offering a rich resource for communities, architects, landscape and urban designers, environmental activists, and public agencies to clean up similarly degraded sites
    • Sponge Parks slow, absorb, and filter surface water runoff to cleanse contaminated canal water, activate the canal edge, and communicate a larger vision for stewardship of the environment to a community with many competing voices
    • The design’s comprehensive approach integrates ecological and urban design, making the project a unique and compelling strategy for improving also urban climate resilience
    • DLANDstudio’s design for the Gowanus Canal is the only project to date that has succeeded in both branding an idea for greater public acceptance and actually performing on the promises of the planning
    Full Description

    Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal is a hidden landmark, a valuable but latent asset to the local and broader community. Formerly a wetland creek, it is now severely polluted and bordered by industrial buildings. Although it is surrounded by residential neighborhoods, there is hardly any public access to the water’s edge. The existing canal bulkhead and drainage is also a piece of hard engineered infrastructure that is seemingly easy to maintain but inadequate for managing extreme weather—when it fails the impacts are catastrophic.

    To facilitate greater access and ecological productivity of the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn-based firm DLANDstudio has invented the Sponge ParkTM. It is designed as a series of public urban waterfront spaces that slow, absorb, and filter dirty surface water runoff to clean contaminated canal water, reduce combined sewer overflow, and to activate the canal edge. Revealing the form, distribution, and size of natural ecological patterns in relation to the shape and patterns of infrastructure, neighborhoods, and political jurisdictions is another key component of the design.

    This book introduces the award-winning Sponge ParkTM in great detail with photos, illustrations, plans, and diagrams. It demonstrates the concept’s potential as component also of a larger vision for a new paradigm of coastal urbanism, upland adaptation, and right of way design in the 21st Century that anticipates more frequent extreme weather impacts and affects American policy making. It is a must-read for design students, architects, and academics as well as for elected officials, policy makers, and community activists.

    About the Author

    Susannah C. Drake is an Associate Professor at University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Environmental Design and founding principal of DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020 her Gowanus Canal Sponge Park project won the inaugural Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award for Climate Action.

    Specifications
    Publisher
    Park Books
    ISBN
    9783038602491
    Publish date
    12th Jun 2023
    Binding
    Paperback / softback
    Territory
    World excluding Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, United States, Canada, and Japan
    Size
    270 mm x 220 mm
    Pages
    128 Pages
    Illustrations
    80 color, 50 b&w
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