Daily News from New York, New York • 350

2 Fnday, December 18, 2009 DAILY NEWS NYDailyNews.com build a new it to be the At the end of Pier 6, which still needs funding, an "Alice in Wonderland" 'Every time we park, we want best one in the continued from previous page Van Valkenburgh. They have designed Teardrop Park in Battery Park City, redone the north end of Union Square and designed a number of piers in Hudson River Park. They are the closest things to rock stars in the world of landscape architecture, totally redefining the profession by dramatically transforming urban land across the world. The Brooklyn Bridge Park design pushes people to the waterfront, letting them touch the water or launch kayaks in four places. Creating hills, lawns and curving pathways that rise and descend like a game of Chutes and Ladders, the firm uses every step up or down to enhance the views.

As More than 1,000 park benches will be made from wood reclaimed on the site 5 a visitor's perspective shifts, the view of the city changes with it. Van Valkenburgh, a teacher at Harvard for 27 years, has been building parks all his life. When he was a child, he wanted to change the direction of a stream. He built a dam to do it. He moved his home to Brooklyn Heights and his office to Court St.

from Union Square when the Brooklyn Bridge Park project got into full swing. Like an excited kid, he gets down on the lawn facing the harbor to show how the horizon shifts based on whether you're sitting or standing, or on whether you're a child'or an adult. "This is the project of a lifetime," he says. "When you're offered sites like this, it's hard to believe it's happening. Every time we build a new park, we want it to be the best one in the world.

The act of living in the city is more complete when your daily life is the blending of city and urban landscape together." Matthew Urbanski, a principal at Van Valkenburgh's firm, owns a nursery with his father in New Jersey. He is world-renowned for building playgrounds. In his parks, he wants you to feel off the city grid and to forget the straight line. "Landscape architecture should make places more powerful," he says. "We hope people rethink how to use public spaces after using this park." A.

Paul Seek manages the project for the firm. He built a deck in his Crown Heights backyard out York City history. Granite slabs from the reconstruction of the Willis Ave. Bridge and the Roosevelt Island Bridge, and earth from the East Side Access Project (the digging of tunnels for the Long Island Rail Road) have all been worked into the landscape. Longleaf yellow pine wood taken from the cold-storage warehouses that used to stand on the site will be used to make the almost 1,000 benches in the park.

Steel trellises on Piers 2, 3, and 5 were kept intact to support lighting and provide shelter for basketball, handball and in-line skating during poor weather. world will await we had used 15- or 18-foot light poles, they would look miniature and not have near the muscle to stand next to a century-old stone bridge. Everything in this park had to be big." Tall, thin and industrial, the light poles on Pier 1A give the park character. While some critics might find the giant poles perplexing, they give the site less of a fairy-tale feel. The focus becomes less on the lights than on the bridge, the water and the skyline.

Even the benches appear to have heft and bulk, countering the curves of the park as it weaves from pier to pier. The power of the harbor Make no mistake: This is a tough site to build anything on. It gets very cold on the water in the winter. The site is narrow. Ten years ago, it was flat.

The BQE stands 40 feet above, creating noise and smog. of wood he plucked from Dump-sters in front of people's houses. To understand the scope of the site, he built a 70-foot model of the park that sits in a warehouse on the grounds. It's safe to say there is no model in the world of landscape architecture like it. "I have no idea what one does after a project of this scale," he says.

"I want to watch people's faces as they walk that first hill and the city rises with them." A recycled park? In a first for 21st-century park engineering, a Water Garden with Eve pools and small bridges covers a storm water-reclamation system with underground pipes and storage tanks that redistribute 80 of the park's irrigation needs. There is no park in the world this size that incorporates that feature into its design. Walking or sitting in this park, you'll be constantly touching New Everything must be big "Every city park in the world near water London, Paris, even Hudson River Park uses dainty, old-fashioned light poles," says Urbanksi. "No way could we do that here. There is nothing precious about this site.

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