Now that the construction of Brooklyn Bridge Park is humming along, lazy days spent idling riverside are but a few hundreds of millions of dollars away. But what's that rumbling sound interrupting our Ultimate Frisbee fantasies? It's the dastardly BQE, according to the Studio for Civil Architecture and Hage Engineering, but fear not, our heroes have joined forces to come up with an idea for muffling the traffic noise. Get a load of the Brooklyn Bridge Connector, a highway-hiding piece of civic art made up of steel arches and translucent sound barrier shells, covered by a solar canopy. The proposal has its own website?complete with sound effects!?and according to its creators, the Brooklyn Bridge Connector is the perfect cure for what will ail the park.
Via the release, we hear from Studio for Civil Architecture principal Donald Rattner:
“There is a practical need to deal with the vehicular noise that emanates from the BQE,” says Rattner who lives a scant three blocks from the much trafficked highway. “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. But there is also an aesthetic dimension that needs to be addressed. Our proposal seeks to provide a pragmatic solution to the problem and simultaneously to offer those on both sides of the river an attractive piece of public sculpture to appreciate.”Repairs to this section of the BQE are slated to begin in 2018, so heck, why not? We applaud this vision, but very softly, so as not to create potentially deafening noise.
· Brooklyn Bridge Connector [brooklynbridgeconnector.net]
· Brooklyn Bridge Park Coverage [Curbed]
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