FOR THE BIRDS

PUBLIC ART INSTALLATION + NATURE PRESERVE

BROOKLYN, NY

This proposal for the East River State Park is not a park per se, but an nature preserve that will host migratory birds and provide a protected landscape for people to experience wildlife in the city.  Created at the time of the city’s rezoning of the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront, it offers a radical alternative to the high-rise, luxury condominiums and public waterfront designs that are typically part of such post-industrial urban redevelopment.  Instead of treating land as a real estate commodity to be maximally built out and intensively used, this conservation/reclamation project proposes to leave it open and open-ended.  It invites animals - birds, in particular - to use the city as both a permanent home and temporary stop-over as they migrate.  Instead of people displacing wildlife, it proposes the inverse - a patch of open space that places animal life at its center.  The first phase of work is a garbage clean-up led by local activists and volunteers.  200 birdhouses will then be designed and built as part of a community design workshop.  Set against the backdrop of Manhattan’s iconic skyline, they are installed as a temporary public art installation along the Atlantic flyway bird migration route.  These initial grass-roots activities will be followed by large-scale restructuring of the site’s shoreline as a series of inlets that transform the water’s edge into an intertidal wetland landscape with localized habitat pockets and undisturbed nesting zones.  Concrete foundations from the site’s former industrial era buildings will be reused as new activity areas, but their footprints are downsized to increase pervious surface coverage by cutting out drainage swales/rain gardens.  Their leftovers are recycled and redistributed as site fill and structure for an elevated boardwalk network which connects the various new wetlands and reclaimed hardscapes, providing public access to the waterfront through an urban environment for birds.