1/8
High Park: Javits Federal Building.
2/8
Urban Terrain.
3/8
High Park Access Elevator Detail.
4/8
Low Park.
5/8
Consolidated Downtown Park.
6/8
Distributed Park Growth.
7/8
Distributed Park + Access Nodes.
8/8
Program Distribution Detail.

GREENSWARD/29

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY

If relocated below 14th Street, Central Park would extend south to Battery Park in an enormous 840 acre consolidated block. Olmsted and Vaux’s 1857 Greensward Plan was the winning competition entry that created Central Park, and Greensward/29 is RLA's proposal for a public park of similar scale uniformly distributed across the roof-tops of lower Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson.

Designed as part of the LMCC’s More Songs About Buildings and Food: Recipes for Downtown, Greensward/29 consists of a series of 29 blockwide green bands edited by the non-gridded street blocks of downtown to produce public spaces that are at once unique in configuration/programming, and newly registered within the grid. Whereas Central Park operates as a break in the 1811 grid, Greensward/29 extends the structure of the grid downtown, redefining private roof space as public park land. 27 sidewalk elevators provide initial accessible routes to the elevated park.