MVVA’s Brooklyn Bridge Park is an expansive look at the twenty-five-year creation of the namesake landscape and its growth as an essential resource for the city around it. The narrative unfolds with more than 300 thoughtfully curated images: archival photos, sketches, artifacts of the planning process, documentation of the park’s construction, and sweeping shots that capture the park’s humanity, beauty, and iconic urban context. Short essays position the volume as a historical treatise, a master class in design strategy, and a portrait of the exceptionally diverse community of visitors who bring the park to life. These elements make Brooklyn Bridge Park a seminal account of transforming an urban waterfront for public good.
Reflecting the park itself, the narrative and pace of Brooklyn Bridge Park are both meandering and loosely organized just enough to make its components legible while allowing readers to engage with the content however they wish. The book opens with a foreword by the landscape architect Julie Bargmann, an intro from Michael Van Valkenburgh, and a look at the site’s existing condition in 1999. These are followed by the book’s five main sections: “Designing the Park,” “Meeting the City,” “Unflattening the Site,” “Planting the Landscape,” and “Remaking the Water’s Edge.” Brooklyn Bridge Park closes with a photo essay called “Escape in the City” and an afterword by park neighbor and food writer Amanda Hesser.
These sections combine high-level descriptions of landscape-making with shorter, place-based essays that make the book both authoritative and highly personal. For example, “Unflattening the Site” leads to “The Sound Berms,” a piece devoted to the topographic innovation that buffers the park from the noise of the expressway and softens visitors’ experience. The imagery serves as chapter transitions, guiding readers from one essay to the next and from one area of the park to the next. This composition alludes to the sensory experience of anticipation and discovery provided by the landscape. The book’s design is intended to express the park’s impressive scale and complexity in a format accessible to all readers. Collage-like collections of imagery are interwoven with immersive full-bleed photography, yet another reference to the rhythms of the landscape. Brooklyn Bridge Park urges readers to understand public parks as works-in-progress that are only ever “completed” by the people who use them, starting with the Robert Smithson quote that opens the volume: “A park can no longer be seen as ‘a thing-in-itself,’ but rather as a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region—the park becomes a ‘thing-for-us.’”
By tracing MVVA’s involvement in the project from 1999 to the present, the book seeks to expand the visibility of the landscape architecture profession and showcase the value of well-funded, sustained stewardship. As cities worldwide address systemic environmental and public health issues wrought by industrial activity and infrastructural missteps of the 19th and 20th centuries, the park is presented as a living model of urban waterfront reclamation and resilience in the face of the climate crisis.
The book is intended for anyone interested in landscape architecture and public space, as well as design professionals, students, parks organizations, and New Yorkers keen to explore a fascinating part of the city’s history. It presents the park as a living classroom for the study of practical foundations of 21st century landscape architecture as well as a setting for pure enjoyment. With a first edition of 3,000 printed copies, Brooklyn Bridge Park is widely available in design-focused and mainstream bookstores as well as online retailers. Chosen among the best architecture books of 2023 by The Architect’s Newspaper, Brooklyn Bridge Park has been widely applauded for the epic scale of its narrative, covering a quarter of a century and the transformation of 85 acres in the heart of New York City. It has also been noted for its collection of luminous photography, the vast majority of which was commissioned and curated by MVVA and book designer Cara Walsh.
Year Completed: 2024
