With Stefanie Werner

Parachute Pavilion: an open design competition for Coney Island

A JUMP INTO URBAN LANDSCAPE

The Competition brief presents a contradiction for designers. On the one hand, we are asked to contribute to a 21st Century vision for Coney Island. On the other, we are directed to ignore the context surrounding the competition site: the Coney Island Development Corporation’s (CIDC) own development plans, the fractured and disjointed quality of development abutting the site, the vacant lots waiting with great expectation for a defining intervention from which to take their cue.

The proposed project, a Parachute Pavilion in the shadow of the landmarked tower, while presenting a seductive formal exercise in solving a rigid set of design parameters, lacks the vision this once renowned site deserves.

Taking our cue from CIDC’s master plan for the area, we offer a broad proposal with an eye not only on celebrating the Parachute Jump’s iconic status but also on the needs of the local community and of the city at large.

We take up the challenge of CIDC’s grand plan and bring to bear contemporary design attitudes aimed at giving back to Coney Island the majesty that it rightfully deserves.

PROJECT

The master plan for the area rightfully concludes that a reinvigorated neighborhood will consist of reestablishing the street grid between Surf Avenue and the Boardwalk. The streets will reintroduce pedestrian traffic where currently the landscape is dominated by parking lots.

Going further, the plan identifies the need to establish green spaces for residents and visitors. The planned parkland site straddles the competition site and the Parachute Jump tower. The design of a Pavilion adjacent to the tower will divide the proposed green space into two non-adjoining spaces. This divided park will offer limited, if any, opportunity to communicate between them.

Our proposal seeks to deflect this dystopic future by interjecting a contemporary landscape that interlaces the fingers of the urban fabric with those of the natural coastal topography. Fields are laced back and forth across the site, mediating between boardwalk and streets, surf, sand and concrete. Buildings become generative landscapes; landscapes become pedestrian bridges between the boardwalk and the ballpark.

Our proposal carefully heeds the needs of the local community by maintaining the much used soccer field while also providing ample areas for relaxing in the open air.

Identifying the Coney Island neighborhood as a cultural landscape bounded on the eastern edge by the New York Aquarium, the proposed park would anchor the western edge with a Coastal Environment museum and exhibition space at the foot of the tower.

The proposal also recognizes the central role of the amusement park that will now be bracketed between these two institutions. The causeway between street and beach, designed as a new pedestrian promenade lined with retail spaces and outdoor cafés, will provide park visitors, as well as beach goers, with a peaceful meeting place. The promenade will also provide a convenient site for an itinerant green market.

At the heart of this pedestrian street is a two-story restaurant with views looking south over the boardwalk towards the horizon. The roof of the restaurant will afford inner city boys and girls free views looking north into the ball park, a time honored tradition among inner city baseball fans.

PROPOSAL SUMMARY