Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village
Project Description
The Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village site and its environs are at once the quintessential model of sustained completeness and open-ended potential:
It commands the largest privately owned and unrestricted foreground in Manhattan.
It is a secret garden.
If its present residents were redistributed back into the city approximately three and a half times more land would be needed to house them.
It could only exist in New York.
We Know:
What distinguishes the dynamic edge conditions of the site and ways to enrich their relationships to the city.
Ways to create a new order for the site that will intensify the too subtle differences and idiosyncrasies of the existing environment.
Ways to resolve the conflict between the original optimistic aspirations for community and the physical reality of the architecture and landscape; to create hierarchy, contrast, and contradiction to overcome the insistent repetitious and pedestrian quality of the experience of the site.
Ways to create a compatible relationship between the landscape and the buildings connecting the vertical experience back to the variegated transition from ground to open sky.
The site looks isolated but isn’t. We know where and when the largest concentration of population occurs each day.
There is the potential to create a new iconic image for New York City that can hold its own with the existing and future skyline.
How to introduce change of lifestyle experiences for members of the community.
What single investment will most enrich the already rich character of the place.
Goals:
To create difference within the repetitive and ubiquitous fabric (hierarchy, contrast, contradiction, procession, temporality).
To enhance or amplify the potential valuable characteristics of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village (contradiction, mystery, moments).
To characterize and stimulate the identity of the place in a positive way (wonder, variety, reciprocity).
To affect change in the character and lifestyle of the place (fantasy, elegance, flexibility).
To increase the perceived and real value of the place (elegance, grace, difference).
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