Merritt Bucholz, Karen McEvoy
The underlying intent of Olmsted’s work in Buffalo references the placing of a City in a Park as opposed to Parks in a City. Nature is considered as a nourishing underlay to the city. It is also a foreground which is complex, multifaceted, revealing and choreographed, supporting living systems, offering spaces and places for engagement with nature-city, providing a structure for a future in sync with time, embodying change.
The connected system: a series of park spaces, parkways, green circles as connective tissue, a necklace of green spaces, accommodating movement paths (pedestrians, cyclists, carriages, skaters), all creating a cohesive green infrastructure. Careful weaving of topography, intertwining natural and built systems, with a layering of the ground plane to accommodate surface paths, ground water, and drainage, whilst creating and directing views.
Creating a rich palette of green civic places, diverse, democratic, egalitarian, formal and informal – greenways, pastoral landscapes, ceremonial spaces, vantage spaces – landscaped places supporting recreation and socialising, supporting the ideal of a healthy living city.
Collaborating with natural systems, calibrating the passage of time, witnessing stories of the city over time, embodying cultural memories, adapting to new patterns of use.
The proposal in its composition seeks to explore the qualities of Olmsted’s work in Buffalo through methods of crafting, joining, weaving, layering, transforming and expressing some of the spatial, haptic and experiential qualities of Olmsted’s landscapes.
Bucholz McEvoy Architects