Tenets and Strategies: Queens Plaza - Affiliating through Differentiation

Notes:

Acknowledging, representing, and mobilizing everything in the site as an act, to perform multiple roles, is a layered strategy not unlike how the photographs intend to mobilize everything in the frame. Internally differentiating and multiplying each thing to situate flows across the site.

Differentiating to affiliate. A site standing up to the elevated - became about finding affiliations among these internally differentiated things. Many acts, few elements, give the impression of a whole.

Movement matters.

The ground matters / thickening the ground. Steel curbs become a place of relationship between the sidewalk and the road, between pedestrians and motorists. By scaling the curb, it harnesses the scale of the site in support of the experience of pedestrians and cyclists and also their comfort, as it buffers the bike and pedestrian paths from traffic and noise.

Situating benches low to the ground, they form a stronger relationship with the ground and become the ground, thicken the ground. Variations of bench types are unified by only a 4-foot seat of black locust.

Use of artist Michael Singer’s elements as three types of surfaces: pavers, runnels for stormwater, and bench cladding to form a series of assemblages…that perform in multiple ways. Examples: pavers with space for plants to grow, bench becoming planter, becoming ground…

Idea of constructing a LANDSCAPE, in which there no complete breaks, no wholes, so that there is nothing that is not belonging, towards producing a landscape the eye can move over without being stopped, making it both expansive and intimate.