Prof. Montgomery’s research centers on inquiry of the place and the built environment through tectonic and spatial analysis. Much of his research examines urban and rural patterns and networks, seeking to reverse the degradation of the American city in the 20th century. There is a critical need for integrated, socially and environmentally just neighborhoods that supply dignified housing in a mixed-use, walkable, connected and healthy environment. Prof. Montgomery recently was the host organizer an AMPS international academic conference Cities in a Changing World, held at City Tech in June 2021, where scholars presented papers on urban conditions and challenges in diverse reaches of the globe. Downtown Brooklyn is a recent laboratory focus for his research on public space in the American city. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center, and supports conferences exploring housing and sustainability along the waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn. His tectonic research includes studies of the Empire State Building, the Louis Kahn museums at Yale, and Ottoman Courtyard Houses in Syria, and the Fine Arts Courts of the Crystal Palace. His is co-director of the Building History Project Lab that supports scholars work on historic architecture; recent work at the lab includes contextual investigation for a 17 century British table at the Metropolitan Museum. He was recently a Futures Fellow at the CUNY Grad Center, where he co-taught a course on Constructing History.
Scale Comparison Analysis, Ottoman Houses in Syria
Brooklyn City Hall Square, early 20th century
Place-based Sustainability: Research and Design Extending Pathways for Ecological Stewardship
Global challenges instigated by climate change and urbanisation are driving research seeking appropriate and effective strategies for social, economic, and environmental sustainability. While technical advancements are a major focus for sustainable development, there are important research avenues that explore the relationship of place and sustainability from a number of perspectives. Place-based sustainability research identifies activities and initiatives that need to be layered and integrated with technological advances, but also help drive them. This research can facilitate the well-considered steering of sustainable development and practices, the essence of stewardship of place.
This volume of a wide range of research and design approaches by a diverse group of authors of various disciplines reveals new perspectives on the relationship of the culture of place and sustainability. The central narrative that emerges from the chapters of this book is the critical cultural relationship of people to their environment, both built and natural. The authors delve into this relationship and see new approaches to support our awareness and appreciation of the nature of our cities and countryside as an integral ecosystem, thereby having the potential to nurture social values and political will for increasing our sustainable practices and resilience. The authors extend to us pathways for stewardship of our cities and countryside that are essential if we are to contend with the serious challenges provoked by our changing climate and the continuing urbanisation of the world’s population.
Montgomery, Jason A. editor. Place-based Sustainability: Human-Environment Research and Design Extending Pathways for Ecological Balance. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022. ISBN13: 978-1-5275-9081-6
The Production and Destiny of Public Space in an American City: Examining the Emergence and Disruption of Brooklyn City Hall Square
Urban form should reflect collective value for place in communities. Urban squares in particular have the potential to serve as the nucleus of communities, urban artefacts that link place to memory and heritage while serving basic needs for everyday life in the city. Civic squares, those linked to governmental institutions, have further potential to facilitate community gatherings for memorialisation, commemoration, celebration and political action. Despite these important functions and potential, the incremental planning of Brooklyn in the early nineteenth century placed little emphasis on squares of any kind, despite the community’s expressed desires. Brooklyn’s first civic square, here referred to as City Hall Square, in fact emerged in the city almost as an afterthought. Despite this lack of clear intent, this square evolved as a unique place in the urban culture of the region, simultaneously a crossroads for everyday life in the city, a commercial and cultural centre and the governmental seat and judicial centre of the city and county. The square was a seamlessly woven and connected place in the larger urban structure. While some discussions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, documented in the local newspaper, provide evidence of appreciation and value for this place, others suggest a resistance to the investment of community heritage and memory as it evolved. This urban space and the larger territory around it, confronted by regional pressures for transformation in the early and mid-twentieth century, was disrupted, leaving the place diminished, no longer serving as a meaningful hub of life in the city. An examination of Brooklyn City Hall Square’s emergence and diminishment reveals a problematic treatment of this place that undermined its potential as a place for civic life, a repository of memory and heritage, but also a living nucleus of the community. It also provides insights for a conceptual framework for future reconstructions or transformations that may facilitate new civic values of place and reinvigorate this urban artefact, relinking it to both the origin of the city and the city’s heritage and memory, but also the square’s future potential as an inclusive, connected and meaningful place of community and civic spirit.
Montgomery, J. ‘The production and destiny of public space in an American city: examining the emergence and disruption of Brooklyn City Hall Square’. Architecture_MPS 23, 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2022v23i1.004
Cities in a Changing World Conference, City Tech
The premise of this conference is that the city is a site of interconnected problems. No single issue dominates its needs. No single discipline has the answers to its questions. As a result, the range of issues we deal with is vast. Urban designers are developing new models of settlement planning to address housing needs. Architects are renovating ever more existing buildings. Infrastructure designers are developing faster modes of transportation. Planners are demanding lower C02 emissions from industry. In a COVID-19 context healthy cities are on the agenda like never before. Policy makers are addressing grass-roots demands for regional governance. While all such issues respond to unique and independent demands, they are all interrelated. Climate change is a perfect example. Scientists, policy makers, activists and designers the world over are engaged in the issue. Some focus on rehousing displaced peoples, others challenge throwaway culture and stress reuse. Health professionals examine disaster relief while planners look at shared transport models. Environmentalists seek to reduce energy consumption, while communities plan for resilience. At the same time, economists look to finance cleaner industries. In tackling a particular issue then, multiple disciplines are overlapping and drawing on the work of others. In short, their work is reaching beyond the boundaries of individual fields.In looking at the city as a site of such inherent interdisciplinarity, the conference venue offers insights. New York is a city of over 8 million people. It has an affordable housing problem and, located on the coast, is threatened by rising sea levels. The site for the United States’ most iconic historic buildings, it demands 21st Century uses of them. The home of the US public health movement in the 19th Century, it was at the forefront of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Historically a landing port for immigrants it knows the pressures of displacement and migration. A city for the wealthiest elites in the world, it exhibits poverty, social exclusion and periodic cultural tensions. In this place, as in cites the world over, none of the issues that vex the metropolis are isolated, and none of their factors, consequences or responses are limited to single disciplines.
Cities in a Changing World: Questions of Culture, Climate and Design. A Conference on Architecture, Urbanism, Planning, Sociology, Health, Environments, Media, Infrastructure and Economies. 2021. Academic Conference co-organized by Jason A. Montgomery and AMPS. New York City College of Technology, City University of New York. Brooklyn, New York.
Montgomery, Jason A., and Jeffrey Burden. 2021. “New York: Rebuilding the History of a City.” Paper presented at Cities in a Changing World: Questions of Culture, Climate and Design. A Conference on Architecture, Urbanism, Planning, Sociology, Health, Environments, Media, Infrastructure and Economies. New York City College of Technology, Brooklyn, New York.
Brooklyn Borough Hall and its Forecourt
Public space in the American city has suffered from neglect or disdain over the course of this young country’s history. Case study analysis reveals the lost potential of initial city plans endowed with purposeful inclusion of public spaces to anchor critical civic structures or functions in American new towns in the 19th century. In Brooklyn, City Hall, now Borough Hall, was placed facing north with a public square to receive those approaching from the ferry landing on the East River. This triangular space went through a significant number of permutations since it was established in 1850. This includes changes to the typological treatment of the space (park, plaza, decorative lawn..) and later the urban morphology of the space itself. Beyond marking the seat of power, this forecourt was the logical placement of one of the first significant monuments in Brooklyn, the Henry Ward Beecher monument. The careful study of the morphological changes to this urban space while tracking the positioning and historic narrative of the monument reveal an ambivalent, problematic, and/or unfortunate management of meaning and memory in the American city.
Montgomery, Jason. 2021. “Monuments in Public Space: Brooklyn Borough Hall and Its Forecourt Examined Over Time.” Paper presented at LIB2205 ID Learning Places: Intersections of Racism, Colonialism, and Sexism, Prof. Susan Phillips. New York City College of Technology. Brooklyn, New York.
Montgomery, Jason. 2020. “The Evolution of the Urban Space at Brooklyn Borough Hall.” Paper presented at the 28th Annual Congress for New Urbanism. St. Paul, Minnesota.
Bayt Fahri and the Sephardic Palaces of Ottoman Damascus
This monograph examines an important Ottoman Era palace in Damascus, Bayt Farhi. The palace is an important survivor of late 18th century courtyard house design for high-status families, in this case a prominent Sephardic Jewish family that saw success in administrative appointments and trade. The configuration of the palace around a series of courtyards with characteristic prominent interior and exterior rooms is a physical record of a way of life in the Ottoman Era that responds to cultural and environmental conditions.
The book provides extensive architectural plans, sections, perspectives, and isometrics along with analytical diagrams illustrate and supplement the text. The drawings provide extensive context for the examination of Bayt Farhi, including scale comparison, urban juxtaposition and context, solar analysis, archeological layering, historic reconstruction, typological evolution, phases of construction, geometric analysis, spatial analysis, use patterns, as well as orientation and documentation of decorative components. Central to this work was the methodology of uniform articulation and documentation of all buildings examined and organizing them for publication at the same scale and solar orientation. This critical method provides a meaningful and rigorous platform for continued scholarly examination.
Macaulay-Lewis, Elizabeth. 2018. Bayt Farhi and the Forgotten Sephardic Palaces of Late Ottoman Damascus. Manar al-Athar Monograph Series, no. 4. With contributions by Ezra Ashkenazie, Jeffery Burden, George H. Lewis, Judith S. Mckenzie, and Jason Montgomery. Boston, MA: American School of Overseas Research. ISBN-13 978-0897571005.
The City as a Learning Lab: Using Historical Maps and Walking Seminars to Anchor Place-Based Research
Undergraduate education continues to evolve as colleges and universities adjust pedagogy and curriculum to the needs of 21st century scholarship and workforce preparation. Interdisciplinary skills are among those that are growing in importance, offering students the opportunity to expand their ability to solve problems through collaborative efforts while stepping back from their focused work in a discipline to explore the larger multidisciplinary context in which their discipline takes place. In the context of a society flooded with access to information, the skills of inquiry and information literacy are also identified as critical for our students’ success, where these skills can guide research that generates new knowledge and allows graduates to curate and analyze information with increasing sophistication. New courses are often required to introduce and reinforce these critical skills. In this chapter, we discuss such a course, Learning Places: Understanding the City, that evolved through a collaboration between faculty from the architecture and library departments. Our efforts to develop this 2000-level co-taught interdisciplinary course centered on inquiry and information literacy led us to a strategy for a research course that combines two particular modes of learning: place-based learning and primary source research. This chapter explores why we chose this approach for this course in the context of our institution, how we collaborate in these teaching modes, and the types of outcomes we are seeing from our students, including the transformation of our students from consumers to producers of information.
Montgomery, Jason A., and Anne E. Leonard. 2021. "The City as a Learning Lab: Using Historical Maps and Walking Seminars to Anchor Place-Based Research.” In Engaging Undergraduates in Primary Source Research, edited by Lijuan Xu, 59-68. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ten Years of Building Technology at City Tech: Reflections on the Evolution of First Year Building Technology Courses in an Open Enrollment Candidate BArch Program.
A BARCH candidate program at City Tech, an open enrollment CUNY college in Brooklyn, New York, offers a portal for increasing access to an architectural career path in the United States. Emerging from a historically vocational culture, the building technology curriculum at City Tech is a case study in the goal for balance between job readiness and critical skills-based education. Formally referred to as construction documents courses, the building technology courses are becoming dynamic laboratories for investigation that integrate with the design curriculum. They also incorporate history and theory to place discussion of structure, materials, tectonics, and performance into context. With all the possibility of new directions for building technology teaching, the foundational skills of reading and drawing cannot be jettisoned, especially for the education of underprepared college students. These students need to build their technical knowledge through enhancing their general education skills of effective reading in the discipline. They also need to develop their visualization/three-dimensional thinking through challenging 2d and 3d drawing construction. Further, all students need to integrate these skills and apply them to understand how buildings are put together and perform, but also how architecture is born through these explorations. This paper reviews the experimentation and development of first-year building technology courses over a ten-year period at City Tech. Case studies of prominent buildings ranging from the Empire State Building to the Yale Center for British Art are presented as a vehicle to provide a place-based laboratory and a historical/theoretical context for learning. Emphasis on three-dimensional explorations of structure and assemblies developed through hand drafting and digital modeling will be reviewed for their learning efficacy. Finally, assessment and improvement techniques for reading technical texts and “reading” orthographic drawings will be presented. These strategies are shown to be particularly useful for a diverse and often underprepared student cohort.
Montgomery, Jason. 2019. “Ten Years of Building Technology at City Tech: Reflections on the Evolution of First Year Building Technology Courses in an Open Enrollment Candidate BArch Program.” In AMPS Proceedings Series 17.2. Education, Design and Practice, edited by Ellyn Lester, 326–38. Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey: AMPS.
The Critical Role of Text-Based Learning to Building Disciplinary Literacy in Architectural Education
Architecture is a demanding discipline with multiple, complex concerns and identities shaping the profession. The discipline requires analysis of complex and multifaceted issues and synthesizing broad knowledge through a focused creative process. While twenty-first-century education may leverage many sources to educate students of architecture, texts remain the primary repository par excellence of the rich and diverse body of knowledge and ideas that continue to inspire and ground architects, theorists, historians, planners, and policy makers tied to the discipline. Perusing and engaging with the diverse body of architectural literature is a strong approach to support one’s learning to think, speak, and write in the discipline with a high level of fluency and expertise. Yet reading, the foundational skill that provides access to the literature is often overlooked in the development of curriculum and the pedagogy of architectural education. This chapter explores in detail the challenges that inhibit student reading and reading effectiveness followed by strategies for building student reading skills in architectural education to support increased disciplinary literacy. Central to the strategies discussed is increased integration of text-based learning and explicit foregrounding of reading and study tools to support students’ learning through text. Key learning principles that serve a foundational role in text-based learning are analyzed to underpin the strategies discussed. Finally, two case studies are provided that exemplify the integration of these strategies that support increased disciplinary literacy in architectural education.
Montgomery, Jason A. 2020. “Teaching a Broad Discipline: The Critical Role of Text-Based Learning to Building Disciplinary Literacy in Architectural Education.” In Teaching College-Level Disciplinary Literacy: Strategies and Practices in STEM and Professional Studies, edited by Juanita C. But, 109–45. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39804-0_5.
Place-Based Learning in an Interdisciplinary Approach to Undergraduate Research
Higher education teaching is an ever-evolving practice that responds to changing student preparation and learning needs, the contemporary needs of business, industry and the professions, research on teaching and practice, and the professional development of faculty. High-impact educational practices (HIEPs) outlined by the AAC&U give faculty a toolkit of specific practices that research identifies as having particular effectiveness in student engagement and learning in the 21st century. Included in this list of effective practices is undergraduate research, defined by the AAC&U as having the goal “to involve students with actively contested questions, empirical observation, cutting-edge technologies, and the sense of excitement that comes from working to answer important questions.” While this high-impact educational practice is most often associated with the sciences, it has wider applicability to undergraduate learning where the methods of research can integrate strategies that further enhance student engagement and learning: place-based learning and interdisciplinary teaching. In this chapter, these two compelling approaches to higher education are presented as a powerful interwoven and integrated approach to undergraduate research.
Montgomery, Jason. 2020. “Learning Places: Place-Based Learning in an Interdisciplinary Approach to Undergraduate Research.” In Interdisciplinary Team Teaching: A Collaborative Study of High-Impact Practices, edited by Reneta D. Lansiquot, 57–84. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56302-8_4.
Light Infill: Innovative Multi-family Courtyard Housing in New York City.
This study addresses the question of how to make use of extremely small empty lots scattered across the city that are owned by the city but difficult to make useful for affordable housing. This study explores balancing the need to maximize the number and diversity of the units on a small lot with the need to control the construction budget and to provide a civilized environment for the residents. The typology of housing on a long and narrow lot is reconsidered to create opportunities for light and creative solutions to multi-family building circulation. These concepts are tested against existing building and zoning regulations.
Montgomery, Jason A., and Anh T. Montgomery. 2019. “Light Infill: Innovative Multi-family Courtyard Housing in New York City.” Big Ideas for Small Lots, Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Manhattan, New York.
Redesigning the Urban Street
Streets are the primary public spaces of cities. They must provide dignified and safe space for everyday life, for community camaraderie, for social interaction, for commercial activity, and movement across the city. The imperative to make urban streets safe places for all modes of activity and movement, especially for pedestrians, requires challenging the conventional prioritization/accommodation of the private vehicle. Public transportation and non-polluting forms of transit including biking need special accommodation to reduce reliance on private vehicles by making them more efficient modes of transit. In addition, the network of streets through cities must transform into permeable corridors that manage storm water and provide significant tree and plant integration to counter heat island effect. This study explores a rebalancing of the design of this space, providing new models for the community to consider.
Re-evaluating Urban Highways: the Past, Present, & Future of the BQE
Urban highways in New York City cut off neighborhoods from the surrounding street networks and fabric, isolating populations that usually are minority and low income while generating health impacts through pollution. The imminent demise of the remarkable cantilevered section of the BQE that saved Brooklyn Heights from the same fate raises a critical question for the city: should great expense be paid to repair this infrastructure when the larger infrastructure is damaging to the residents along its length where it is not so neatly hidden away? Elizabeth Goldstein came to join our BWRC Breakfast Talk series to discuss her role as a member of the Mayor’s Expert Panel reviewing the city’s options for the future of the BQE expressway in Queens and Brooklyn. I set the stage for our conversation with a historical overview of the planning and initial construction of the expressway and its impact on the urban fabric of Brooklyn in the mid-20th century.
Montgomery, Jason. 2020. “THE PAST, PRESENT, & FUTURE OF THE BQE. A Conversation with Elizabeth Goldstein, President of the Municipal Art Society.” Presenter and Moderator. Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center Breakfast Talk. New York City College of Technology. Brooklyn, New York. March 6, 2020.
Historic Analysis of Place: The Public Squares of St. Paul
Public space in the American city has suffered from neglect or disdain over the course of this young country’s history. Case study analysis reveals the lost potential of initial city plans endowed with purposeful inclusion of public spaces to anchor critical civic structures or functions in American new towns in the 19th century. St. Paul, Minnesota offers a poignant example of this lost potential, where two of the initial five public squares dissipated from focal civics spaces into unrecognizable blocks in the contemporary city. The study of the evolution of American urban spaces is a critical step towards supporting a renaissance of American civic structure endowed with public spaces for community, protest, and the rebuilding of a democratic culture.
Montgomery, Jason. 2020. “Methods of Historic Analysis of Place to Guide Urban Interventions.” (28th Annual Congress for New Urbanism. St. Paul, Minnesota. June 10-12, 2020.)
Combating Urban Stratification: Building Fresh Strategies for Integrative Symbiotic Urban Interventions
Cities around the globe contend with the challenge of meeting the high demand for new housing, especially affordable housing, and integrating this housing throughout the city as one means of preventing the forces of gentrification that exasperate the stratification of urban populations. Contemporary development in cities in the United States, however, often faces skepticism that draws its roots in the lived experience of poorly conceived and designed urban renewal projects of the mid 20th century. Advocates for social justice argue that poor minority communities are frequent targets for increasing development rights that, while providing additional affordable housing along with new market rate units, inevitably lead to increased displacement of existing residents. Despite the evolution towards improved urban design that respects the complex nature of cities, new models and explorations are required to supply communities with tools for evaluation of the potential for symbiotic development. Investigations of integrative design can offer existing residents examples of urban development interventions than can be critiqued and evaluated for their potential for neighborhood improvement where new and old fabric are woven together around an improved public realm with stronger connectivity to the surrounding communities. This paper reviews the public debate in New York City around proposals to build new housing on public housing estates as a prime example of this tension between social justice and equity and market demand, and then provides a exploration of integrative development approaches that address this issue of under-used urban land that effectively separates communities and facilitates stratification across racial and economic lines. The approach applies urban design principles rooted in Jane Jacob’s analysis of urban structures that turn existing challenges into opportunities for place-making that leverage and respect existing fabric and build new possibilities for diversifying urban communities.
Montgomery, Jason. 2020. “Combating Urban Stratification: Building Fresh Strategies for Integrative Symbiotic Urban Interventions.” Paper presented at The City and Complexity – Life, Design and Commerce in the Built Environment. City, University of London. London, England.
TECHNĒ: City Tech Department of Architectural Technology Journal
I helped form the concept of this new departmental journal and helped steer its development over the first five years of publication. My role as one of three faculty editors included forming the theme for each annual journal, working with faculty and professionals to develop essays and interviews, and collect and curate student work. In the final stages of production I also served as the copy editor. I organized exhibitions to coincide with the release of the annual issue.
Website: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_techne/
Building History Project Lab
Our lab explores methods of studying historic fabric through contextualizing modeling, 3d scanning, organizing critical analysis information, and sharing through dynamic platforms. To date our pilot projects have focused on an 18th century English table attributed to Matthias Lock, the Venetian Room linked to Ca Sagredo, the Pompeian murals from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, and the Gubbio Studiolo, all from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
This method of investigation has informed student work at City Tech investigating the Empire State Building, the Yale Art Gallery, and the Yale Center for British Art. Our lab also supports scholars investigating historic architecture, including our work with Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, PhD at the CUNY GRAD Center.
Montgomery, Jason and Jeffrey Burden PhD. 2021. “New York: Rebuilding the History of a City.” (AMPS Conference: CITIES IN A CHANGING WORLD: QUESTIONS OF CULTURE, CLIMATE AND DESIGN. City Tech, CUNY, New York. June 16-18, 2021.)
Montgomery, Jason and Jeffrey Burden PhD. 2019. THE BUILDING HISTORY PROJECT: Analytical Modeling of Historic Buildings and Artifacts. Invited lecture/workshop in the NYC Digital Humanities Series. CUNY Graduate Center. Manhattan, New York. February 8, 2019.
Affordable Housing Against the Odds/Innovative Developments Along the Brooklyn Waterfront
Private and non-profit housing developers engaged in a lively conversation about their respective efforts to provide quality affordable housing for a range of residents. Martin Dunn, President of Dunn Development, Frank Lang, Director of Housing at St. Nicks Alliance, Brenda Rosen, CEO of Breaking Ground, and Michelle de la Uz, Executive Director of Fifth Avenue Committee, introduced their respective development portfolios along the Brooklyn Waterfront. Among the greatest challenges facing affordable development, the panelists agreed, are the costs of land and construction. “Affordable housing isn’t affordable to develop,” noted de la Uz.
Montgomery, Jason. 2019. “Affordable Housing Against the Odds/Innovative Developments Along the Brooklyn Waterfront.” Moderated Panel in LIVING IN BROOKLYN: Housing Along the Brooklyn Waterfront Conference. Conference Co-organizer + Panel Moderator. Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center, New York City College of Technology. Brooklyn, New York. April 12, 2019.
DURA: City Tech Solar Decathlon House 2015
Professor Montgomery was a significant contributor to this project during its construction phase. He served as a designer on minor details, a construction supervisor leading a student team, and a mentor supporting the overall project team both in Brooklyn and at the competition site in Irvine California. His work supported the larger student team lead by Professor Alexander Aptekar, the principal investigator of the project, and Professor Paul King, who was a lead supervisor of construction supporting Professor Aptekar. This project served as laboratory for the student team to test design and construction concepts for an off the grid house and then execute and adapt during construction as contingencies required.
The house found a permanent home in Denver, Colorado, where it provides a home for a needy family but also continues to provide data to campus in Brooklyn to further the research.
Department of Energy DURA team page: https://www.solardecathlon.gov/2015/competition-team-ny-city-tech.html
Brooklyn Square: A Gateway to Brooklyn
w/ Professor Michael Duddy
The Brooklyn Bridge stands as a great iconic structure of New York along with the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the Chrysler building. The bridge is an attraction in its own right, with an estimated 1.4 million pedestrians walking the bridge each year. In addition, the bridge carries over 100,000 cars between Brooklyn and Manhattan each day. Nearby, the Manhattan Bridge carries an additional 85,000 cars daily as well as 1.4 million cyclists each year. An additional 340,000 New Yorkers cross the East River each day on the subways whose tracks run on the Manhattan Bridge.
Curiously, neither bridge arrives in Brooklyn with much fanfare despite the rising prominence of the borough. The lack of an arrival gesture likely prompts many pedestrians on the Brooklyn Bridge to turn around to head back to Manhattan before ever reaching Brooklyn. Historically, the Manhattan Bridge arrived in a square called Bridge Plaza, where limestone monuments endowed one’s arrival with a flare and dignity, but this space and the monuments are lost to modern changes to the road design.
With Brooklyn’s rise in the imagination and aspirations of New Yorkers and visitors to the city, there is a growing need and justification for a gateway to mark the arrival in the borough that leverages not only the iconic power of the Brooklyn Bridge but also leverages the convergence of this bridge and the Manhattan Bridge as they enter Brooklyn.
This project explores the potential for the development of what could be branded “Brooklyn Square”, a new urban space that will greet the borough’s visitors, provide a commensurate amenity to the Brooklyn Bridge that can serve as a visitor’s center and museum celebrating engineering and the bridge’s design, link the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge’s pedestrian walkways, and reconnect adjacent neighborhoods that have been blocked by the many ramps and barriers of the two bridges’ vehicle access roads.
Most importantly, the square will include a major vertical landmark element, the equivalent of the St. Louis Gateway Arch or the Space Needle in Seattle, to welcome visitors to the borough and provide a compositional compliment to the vista of the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan.
This project includes traffic analysis, precedent studies, and design diagrams to guide Brooklyn Square’s development.
Montgomery, Jason A., and Michael Duddy. 2015. “Brooklyn Square: A Gateway to Brooklyn.” Poster presented at the City Tech Faculty Research Poster Session. New York City College of Technology. Brooklyn, New York.