Location: Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Design discipline: Urban Intervention + Festival
Date: (start/completion): Feb. 2011- June 2011
Nonprofit organization client: Nostrand Park (Laurel K. Brown, Director of Community Planning)
Design team: VAMOS Architects (Evan Benett and Silvia Fuster, principals)
desigNYC advisor: Lisa Green/Selldorf Architects
Named after Nostrand and Park, two Brooklyn streets that run through Crown Heights, Nostrand Park is a placemaking organization committed to fostering continued arts, community and commercial development in Crown Heights. NP utilizes a full spectrum of new media tools to promote community revitalization, as well as engaging “on-the-ground” projects such as merchant organizing, community greening and cleaning, and art expos.
Design Challenge
Given the amount of vacant storefronts along Nostrand Avenue, between Atlantic Avenue and Eastern Parkway, how do we get people to buy-in to the idea that Nostrand Avenue–which is widely regarded as distressed and “gritty”– can become an exciting destination.
Project Objectives
The concept behind Destination Nostrand’s pop-up urban interventions is to create a lively streetscape, provide a vision for landlords, residents and potential tenants of how to activate these storefronts, day and night, along this commercial corridor. Its goal is to encourage business development and community involvement along Nostrand Avenue.
Description of Deliverables
The final design product will be a pamphlet outlining the challenges and opportunities of the pop-up streetscape concept, including a map of the open spaces along Nostrand Avenue and a vision for each type of prototypical invention. These interventions include proposals for temporary street furniture, a series of “porch” conversions to activate shuttered storefronts, new window display concepts, and the rehabilitation of awnings and interior spaces to bring a sense of design to the street.
A pilot program of the concept was launched on June 25 on Nostrand Avenue. It featured guided tours of the district, viewing of pop-up installations, visits of historical sites and new and popular businesses, free ballroom dance lessons and wine tasting and tapas.
Audience/community outreach and involvement
Over the years, Nostrand Park had published a lot of data about the potential of Nostrand Avenue, but it was not until we were able to couple that information with VAMOS’ renderings, packaged in a cute video, that people really started to pay attention. We received over 500 hits in 2 days, over 100% more than what we normally receive.
Lessons learned/obstacles/successes (of the collaboration):
The process has fueled new creative ideas for prototyping urban strategies within the architect studio. Encouraged by the energy of the Nostrand Park team they have felt the enormous potential for this low budget/high impact approach to design.
Project discussions have been far-reaching and exploratory. The team, including Nostrand Park’s event planner, has even begun discussions of other collaborations outside the desigNYC framework.
Impact at city level and at human quality of life level
The project is meant to be a prototype strategy for addressing distressed or maligned streets and to encourage business development and community involvement in any urban environment–whether in New York City or beyond.
The feedback to the concept itself has been overwhelmingly positive, including endorsement by the Department of Small Business Services.
