CLOSE THE GAP: New York East River Greenway Competition

Close the Gap, an international design competition sponsored by Transportation Alternatives and d3, invites architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, and students worldwide to broaden the dialogue of alternative solutions for sustainable urban living. The competition focuses on the Midtown sector of New York City’s East River Greenway--a critical missing link in Manhattan’s alternative transportation infrastructure.

How can the East Side Greenway’s missing link be creatively retrofitted, reoccupied, and re-greened?

How would a fully-integrated continuous greenway system make New York City more environmentally sensitive, economically productive, and socially engaged?

Can the innovative use of materials, technologies, and spatial organizations enhance our quality of urban life?

Close the Gap offers a forum for the discussion, development, and promotion of innovative urban concepts. Entrants are asked to critically examine the relationship of pedestrians and cyclists to public space, opportunities for merging the city with nature, as well as re-engagement of the individual with social environments in a Midtown Manhattan context. The competition invites a full spectrum of proposals that creatively intermingle current and emerging forms of transport.

Close the Gap calls for proposals that fundamentally transform how people move through Manhattan. The competition offers a platform for exploring emerging ethics and aesthetics in urban design, as well trans-disciplinary underpinnings that link ecology with architecture, landscape
architecture, planning, and urbanism. Close the Gap welcomes submissions that propose diverse, multi-layered, and nuanced understandings reconnecting people with cities, waterfronts, and alternative transportation systems. Entrants are encouraged to craft the fullest possible definition of alternative transportation that offers the potential to flexibly adapt and grow over time.

Top concepts, designs, and images will be selected as finalists by a diverse jury of distinguished academics and professionals. Winning and top projects will be publicized in a broad media campaign in Fall 2011. An exhibition of competition winners will be shown at the Center for Architecture in NYC, Center Gallery at Fordham University, as well as other venues. A permanent gallery of all projects submitted to the competition will be published on-line. A print publication of winning and top design proposals is anticipated.

Please visit the competition website for full details:
www.d3space.org/closethegap

For further information on Transportation Alternatives:
www.transalt.org

For further information on d3:
www.d3space.org
www.d3space.org/dialog
www.d3space.org/competitions