International Design Competition
To take advantage of the potential for the adaptive end use of this unique site, in 2001 the City of New York conducted a two-stage International Design Competition to foster the development of a master plan for Fresh Kills. The goal was to attract the best talent, worldwide, to generate ideas and innovative designs that would meet the needs of the City's communities, and respond to the natural and constructed history of the site.
A multi-disciplinary expert consultant team let by landscape architecture firm Field Operations was chosen through the design competition to produce the Draft Master Plan.
 View "What is a Master Plan?" factsheet.
Field Operations' winning proposal, lifescape, envisioned Fresh Kills Park as a new form of public ecological landscape; a new paradigm of creativity and adaptive reuse. lifescape was to be informed by the voice of an engaged public and shaped by time and process. The Field Operations team imagined an ecologically robust landscape, not as a pastoral refuge from the city, but as an active agent within it. Fresh Kills would provide richly diverse settings for wildlife, birds and plants, and serve as a vibrant locus for social life - for all kinds of active recreation, for physical and cultural experience. Because the site is vast and complex, the idea of a landscape developed in stages, unfolding over time - as all life does - was central to the competition proposal and remains at the core of the Draft Master Plan.
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