Futuristic Enclosure Thingy Proposed for the BQE
It never hurts to dream. Manhattan-based architecture firm Studio for Civil Architecture just released its proposal for a visual and sound barrier between the BQE and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Regardless of what is ultimately built on the waterfront housing, restaurants, ball fields, passive recreation areas visitors to the open space and surrounding structures will be…
Rendering via Studio for Civil Architecture
It never hurts to dream. Manhattan-based architecture firm Studio for Civil Architecture just released its proposal for a visual and sound barrier between the BQE and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Regardless of what is ultimately built on the waterfront housing, restaurants, ball fields, passive recreation areas visitors to the open space and surrounding structures will be subject to relentless, unpleasant, potentially deafening noise at 85 decibels, the equivalent of standing next to an operating lawnmower,” says architect Donald Rattner, who designed the lightweight structure to encase the triple-cantilever of the roadway with Hage Engineering. Evidently this stretch of the BQE is scheduled to be repaired in 2018 and the designers want to throw their idea into the ring now. You can see more renderings and listen to the 85 decibels of traffic noise here. Dig it?
rob- Thanks, but I think I’ll stay in Brooklyn where I have lived all my life. It’s not a crime to envision better things for this city. If you like, however, you can take some of the dirt from Brooklyn and your arrogance back to Jersey.
Not only that, but our founding fathers were anti-urban.
Read Jefferson’s writings. He felt that the cities were the centers of corruption and vice. The countryside was uplifting both morally and physically. And he was one of the most progressive and least religious of the founding fathers. Adams hated the mix of religions in the city. Franklin was an urbanite, but he lived in Paris and for a Quaker, was pretty confortable with French morals.
Americans like space and the open road. I think many tend to associate cities with dangerous criminal elements and society snobs.
That is changing of course. But slowly.
Sometimes I think we still see ourselves as the early pioneers, roaming free on the plains, heroically adventurous ( and totally living in a fantasy world with a short memory of how cruel the early pioneers actually could be). Tell me what you mean by anti-urban. Do you mean because so many people have fled to the suburbs and we concentrated so much on building them?
bxgirl, I think Europeans are every bit as car-dependent as we are. I think the difference may be that poor people, minority people, tend not to live in the center cities of Europe but rather in the periphery. The opposite of here.
What tourists and business people see is the wealthy beautiful urbane central districts -not the decrepit suburbs. I have been to Paris many times but have never visited the suburbans areas where the riots happened last year. Same thing in London, the aristocratic classes live in the center of town and in the countryside, the suburbs are for the middle class and poorer folks depeding on the community. Actually the same pattern is true in Latin America. The rich live in the inner city and the poor live in the “favelas” in what we would call the suburbs. Americans are peculiar. We are, and always have been, anti-urban.
Mr Brownstoner,
Are you going to add a way we can “share” topics like other blogs have to social networking site?
I would like to share with some friends!
Sam;
The reason you don’t see old cars in Western Europe (or Japan for that matter) is that used cars are usually shipped to less-developed markets like Eastern Europe or SE Asia. Both regions’ governments facilitate these markets in order to support their manufacturers. It kind of forces people in the wealthy areas to buy a new car.
I agree with FSRQ that the noise level in European and Asia cities is higher. For all the brow-beating we like to do, traffic in NYC is alot better than in many other world-class cities, thanks to…..Robert Moses and his foresight.
sam- does it have anyhting to do with the size of the cars Americans tend to drive- don’t we go in for bigger, heavier vehicles, and a much heavier volume of traffic? I always had the impression that Europe was not os car dependent as we are.
“You’re welcome to your dirt and grit and noise, Rob. The rest of us will continue to dream of better air quality, better views, less noise pollution, and a general public attention to the pleasantness of our hometown.”
***Delusion***
“are you forced to live next to the bqe? no. there’s nothing worse than people who moan and complain about urban life and say oh if it was only like europe. blah blah blah. go to europe then! some of us like the noise, and i can tell you straight out that it was 10x noisier on my block when i lived in harlem than it is on the bqe. if the person with the noise reader (lol) wants to go check it, do so. people please stop trying to turn nyc into a sleepy suburb.”
Spot-On Rob!
The What
Someday this war is gonna end…
The thing I have noticed about Europe is that nobody drives old cars. All the cars are very late model. And so are the trucks. By comparison, NY is like a junk yard museum. The other incredible thing is that their roads are finished. In New York our roads are never finished, they are always being rebuilt and rebuilt and the place looks like it is recovering from a war or an earthquake, although the recovery never concludes. How long have they been rebuilding the BQE? The Harlem River Drive? The Bruckner?
Unbelievable. How many times in the past twenty years have they rebuilt the approach ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge? Is this corruption or what?