MFN Maritime Forest Network
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Change the Course: NYC Waterfront Construction Competition 2012 Presented by NYCEDC
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NYC
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NYCAF
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New York City Ancestry Forest
MFN Maritime Forest Network
NYC Maritime Forest Network
New York City Ancestry Forest [NYCAF] NYC
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Prepared by Christianna Grace Bennett American Architectural and Landscape Designer
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MFN Maritime Forest Network
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NYC
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i. Preface
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The New York City waterfront is an ecological keystone situated within a larger, regional ecologic MFN
system. Forested corridors of boreal forest [conifer and alpine forest] and the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains to the north provide important migratory paths from far inland, routes that animals use to connect to the eastern seaboard, in addition to being a drainage basin for the entire watershed [see Fig. 5.3 for further information]. New York City, more specifically Manhattan, also acts as the protective barrier island landscape within the watershed, as it drains out to the Atlantic Ocean. The “New York City Ancestry Forest (NYCAF)” surveys the misunderstood New York waterfront as a dynamic, highly connected and transformative landscape situated amidst the continuing natural and man made renewal cycles of New York. The ephemeral nature of landscape is the view from which this design derives its roots, linking New York to its larger ecological context, both to the northern forests and eastward to the ocean. This approach studies strategies of forests north of the city for preserving land, material integrity, and sustainable building; also taking into account the local, maritime conditions of the East and Hudson Rivers as drivers for a new and unique landscape condition. Maritime Forest Network
MFN Maritime Forest Network
This project views the social environment of New York City as a contemporary anomaly. Calling together people from all walks of life and varying worldviews, the city bears the burden of millions of people hoping to make their mark “on the city” and consequentially on its environment. Through the lens of the culturally-permeable human fascination with ancestry, the proposed forestwetland system will populate itself with plants, especially trees, serving as ancestral markers of those who wish to purchase a plant and decide its location within the proposed landscape. Taking from numerous cultural practices of keeping sacred forests and sacred trees, and also romanticizing the ancient tradition of respecting tree deities, the project will behave as an iconic cultural landscape, a sacred landscape, that will become as valuable as what are now the oldest cultural centers in the city. As the two designed sites, the Lower Manhattan Waterfront and Pier 40, begin to fill with the proposed “spirit trees” belonging to thousands of New York families, new sites will begin being identified and designed in a similar fashion in the future. These will become new projects growing along identified forest and maritime networks, connecting New York to improved ecological bearings, and strengthening both the natural and cultural infrastructures of this irreplaceable American urban phenomenon.
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