LOOP|8: Christopher Marcinkoski, Andrew Moddrell
Larchmont, NY USA |
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"ALREADY, THREE-QUARTERS OF NEW YORKERS LIVE WITHIN A 10- MINUTE WALK OF A PARK."
– NYC Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe
The National Park service currently operates 20 types of National Park – four types of which can currently be found within the New York Megalopolis. New York City alone has more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreation facilities across the five boroughs. City Parks' properties total more than 28,000 acres.
Add to this proposed new flagship open spaces like Fresh Kills, the Highline, Governor's Island, Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront redevelopment – as well as the 20 or so existing New York State parks within the metropolitan area – and the question of GATEWAY'S role within the New York Megalopolis moving forward into the 21st century becomes considerable.
Capital investment in public open space at the scale currently seen within New York is both worthwhile and commendable. However, is the continued development of conventional parkland alone enough to sustain the transformation and changes that the megalopolis will undergo over the next century?
In addition to stewardship and preservation, we propose cutting-edge science and active research. We propose GATEWAY to become a new type of national park – an infrastructure as much as an amenity.
GATEWAY should be re-designated a NATIONAL ECO-URBAN RESEARCH ZONE – a territory that both promotes stewardship of existing natural and native resources, but also engages in the active exploration of the relationship between dynamic ecosystems and ongoing anthropologic urbanization.
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Christopher Marcinkoski and Andrew Moddrell formed loop|8 in the fall of 2004 following their graduation from the Yale School of Architecture. Their design work and research has been exhibited internationally in Germany, Scotland, China and South Korea, as well as in the U.S. Their urban research received an International Bauhaus Prize in 2004. In the spring of 2006, they were recognized by Van Alen Institute for their entry to the Philadelphia URBAN VOIDS Competition.
Christopher Marcinkoski works as an architectural and urban designer at Field Operations in NYC. He holds a BArch from Penn State University and an MArch from Yale University, where he was awarded the H.I. Feldman Prize for outstanding design and the Christopher Tunnard Fellowship for excellence in planning. In 2004, Mr. Marcinkoski was awarded the prestigious SOM Foundation Fellowship for Urban Design. He is co-editor of the recently published Perspecta 38 | architecture.
Andrew Moddrell works as a designer at Garofalo Architects and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He holds a BArch from the University of Kansas and a MArch from Yale University, where he was awarded the H.I. Feldman Prize for outstanding design. Prior to joining Garofalo Architects, he worked at UrbanLab in Chicago and at A. Zahner Architectural Metals in Kansas City.
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