LA+ ICONOCLAST Redesign New York’s Central Park ARCHITECTURE COMPETITIONS

LA+ ICONOCLAST asks you to redesign New York’s Central Park, which has been fictionally devastated by eco-terrorists. Here’s the brief:

Central Park is arguably the canonical work of modern landscape architecture. Its aesthetic and socio-political ideals of health, beauty and democracy underpin the profession of landscape architecture, which Olmsted first named, to this day. Writing of the park in 1973, the artist Robert Smithson claimed that Olmsted “combined both art and reclamation in Central Park in a way that is truly in advance of his times.” But what would Olmsted do today? What will you do?

This competition asks that you redesign Central Park, starting, as Olmsted and Calvert Vaux did, from scratch. In doing so this competition seeks to explore the following questions: 1) If in parks, no matter how faux or superficial, we manifest a collective aesthetic expression of our relationship with the “natural” world, then what, on the occasion of nature’s disappearance, is the aesthetic of that relationship today? 2) What is the role of a large urban park today? 3) How might issues of aesthetics on the one hand and performance on the other coalesce into what Olmsted described as “a single work of art”? 4) Given the extraordinary history of the Central Park site, the competition asks how the new interprets the old, and how together, the new and the old anticipate the future.

In short, the brief is to create the concept for a new, 21st century Central Park. The brief asks for a plan, a short explanatory text, and discretionary supporting imagery. The competition favors conceptual rigor and imagination, and places a premium on engagement with the questions outlined above. Basic issues of feasibility, materiality, circulation, and programming will also be taken into consideration by the jury.

Charles Waldheim is the John E. Irving Professor and Director, Office for Urbanization at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He coined the term “landscape urbanism” to describe the emergent discourse and practices of landscape in relation to design culture and contemporary urbanization. On these topics, he is author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory (2016) and editor of The Landscape Urbanism Reader (2006). Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Lola Sheppard is a founding partner of Lateral Office and Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Lateral Office is an architecture practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The studio describes its practice process as a commitment to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, engaging in the wider context and climate of a project – social, ecological, or political. Sheppard’s work has been exhibited extensively and she has lectured across the USA, Canada, and Europe. Lateral Office was awarded a Special Mention at the 2014 Venice Biennale for Architecture, a PA award in 2013, and the 2012 Holcim Gold for Sustainable Construction for North America, for their work on the Arctic. Sheppard is co-author (with Mason White) of Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (2017) and of Pamphlet Architecture 30, COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism (2011). Sheppard is a co-editor of the journal Bracket.

Geoff Manaugh is a freelance writer, author of the New York Times-bestselling book A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016), and former director of Studio-X NYC, an off-campus event space and urban futures think tank run by Columbia GSAPP. He is well known for his architecture blog BLDGBLOG and regularly cover issues related to cities, technology, and design for publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to The Atlantic. In 2016, A Burglar’s Guide to the City was optioned for television by CBS Studios and, in 2017, his short story “Ernest,” published by VICE, was optioned for film by Legendary Entertainment. He has taught graduate design studios at Columbia University, USC, and UC Berkeley. Manaugh lives in Los Angeles, where he is writing a book on the history and future of quarantine. For more, see: http://www.bldgblog.com/

Beatrice Galilee is the Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She trained in architecture at Bath University, and holds an MSc in History of Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Galilee specializes in the dissemination of architecture and design through media, curatorial practice, research, editing, and teaching. She was the Chief Curator of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, “Close, Closer,” and has curated exhibitions and events around the world including 2013 and 2012 Milan Design Weeks, 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, and 2009 Shenzhen Hong Kong Biennale. She is the co-founder and director of The Gopher Hole, an exhibition and event space in London, architectural critic at Domus, and associate lecturer at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London. She was the architecture editor of Icon Magazine between 2006 and 2009.