Jacob Javits Plaza

"For most people, the landscape means only forests and oceans, winding rivers, sandy dunes, endless prairies, and other untouched, purely natural places. My landscape is completely different. It consists of walks between buildings, roads, shopping malls, parking lots… everything that surrounds buildings in cities. And I see it as my mission to create such public spaces that people will appreciate and respect—places where they would actually want to live. This is the biggest challenge in terms of sustainable cities—to create a livable city.”

Jacob Javits Plaza is a square in Lower Manhattan that, together with the buildings The Jacob Javits Federal Office Building and Court of International Trade, built in 1969, forms one block. The square, along with these unattractive structures, was once labeled by Time magazine as the ugliest public space in America. The installation of Richard Serra's sculpture 'The Tilted Arch' (a nearly forty-meter long inclined wall made of corten) in 1981 did not help its reputation. It attracted even more opponents than admirers and was removed after eight years of court battles. True design and functionality only came with Martha Schwartz's project.
The goal was to connect the unattractive space with its surroundings and provide people with countless seating options, whether for traditional New York dining or simply for observing the life around them, with the main visitors being office workers from the adjacent buildings. To expand the seating area, extensive group plantings and a large non-functional fountain taking up the only sunny part of the plaza were removed.
The main feature of the plaza is the double-sided benches that meander back and forth, offering a wide range of seating options. They create intimate nooks for groups of people, as well as side arcs for those who want to sit alone. Their flowing shape and bright green color inject a strong dose of energy into the space, just like the clipped hedges in French parterre de broderie, whose edges are also defined by surrounding trees or buildings. These clipped hedges here transform into functional furniture requiring occasional painting instead of regular trimming. The brilliant green color was deliberately chosen because its brightness helps to illuminate the plaza, which is largely in the shade. The design of the benches references traditional New York park benches but modifies and modernizes them with their shape, length (a total of 518 meters), and color. Other traditional New York elements are also present, such as blue enamel drinking fountains, orange wire trash bins, and typical street lighting. However, their design has also been slightly altered and improved compared to those of Frederick Law Olmsted. Martha Schwartz aims to hold a mirror to contemporary New York landscape architecture, which, according to her, is still too tied to Olmsted and his mid-19th-century standards. The benches meander around six two-meter hills that were originally grassed over. At their summits were misters that refreshed the entire area during hot months. However, the misters were later removed, and these hemispheres were planted with evergreen shrubs.
Despite the obvious uniqueness of the design, the project has been criticized for poor operational characteristics, lack of shaded areas at lunchtime, and associated low visitor numbers. Therefore, in 2009, Michael Van Valkenburgh (FASLA) was commissioned for another redevelopment of the plaza. According to him, the design will adhere to some elements of Martha Schwartz's 'pop' landscape but intends to simplify seating and movement within the plaza. Through redevelopment and plantings, he aims to shift this place towards a greener urban landscape. Thus, Martha Schwartz's work, which won the American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award and the Phillip N. Winslow Landscape Design Award in 1997 and is found in various landscape architecture textbooks, will come to an end. Since the removal of Serra's sculpture The Tilted Arch, this nearly acre-sized plaza has already undergone its fourth alteration in the last 20 years, reflecting the ever-changing ideas about urban public space in its endless transformations.