Coleman Oval Park

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Location: New York, NY
Square Footage: 155,940
Type: Landscape
Year: 2011

Three primary actions define our re-imagination of Coleman Oval Park.Fences at the site's perimeter are removed in their entirety. Overall site boundaries are defined by path and lawn, instead of vertical barrier. Cities consist of transitory spaces - streets, parks, promenades - weaving between or around functionalized structures (in the city's case, buildings). Our imagined master plan appropriates these relationships in a loose, verdant and energized landscaped punctuated by structured, enclosed and formalized activity.  Fences are pushed inwards into the body of the park and made vibrant and colorful, defining zones of more intense physical activity. A typically amalgamated urban park, in which functional adjacencies can satisfy an efficiency of program, is often quite an inefficient strategy for the overall utility of the park itself. At Coleman Oval Park the enorous space of the baseball field effectively relegates a vast amount of real estate to underuse. In a park dedicated to play, an efficient series of adjacent sporting functions can, in fact, be wasteful. Our vision posits the displacement of the baseball field and the establishment of a partnership with the Bergtraum High School diamond to the south of Coleman in order to maintain the important civic position of this sport while releasing a significant amount of ground back for park use. With this freed space in hand, we also propose a far looser arrangement of the functional, compartmentalized uses of the park (handball, dog run, etc.), and we have scattered these pieces about the park within the fenced areas. Flowing space surrounds these action-enclosures and remains un-programmed, to be occupied and used an a more improvisational fashion. Colorful fences deliniating the formal action zones provide necssary shelter, security and containment of sporting activites from the surrounding park, while also adding character and texture.  Horizontal surfaces are color-coded to match their fenced enclosure. Shades of complementary ground tones reinforce the discrete action-zones as social spaces, interactive places of sport and recreation. Additionally, these places are differentiated by a variety of horizontal surfacing texutres and materials, lending texture to the experience underfoot.  {Sponsoring organization: http://architectureforhumanity.org}

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