2014 MAS Summit for New York City

The Brooklyn Naval Hospital Cemetery Memorial Park site is a complex layered one. It was last used in 19th and early 20th centuries, as an unmarked burial ground, and has since remained vacant. Now the site will be activated as the first open space node along the Brooklyn Greenway, creating an experience of landscape and planted form that offers retreat, remembrance, and engaged observation. The plantings of the memorial meadow focus on establishing much needed native plant fodder for the many forgotten pollinators critical to the ecological health of the region, including butterflies, honey bees, and pollinator moths. This immersive meadow experience informs the public of the importance of pollinator habitat in the urban environment while symbolically attracting many forms of life to a place that has historically commemorated death. Initially planted in a strict rectilinear pattern reinforced by steel cable frames that reference burial plots, the plantings will eventually drift across the site, to create new patterns and establishing a self-sustaining, ‘open-ended’ ecology.  The Fred Sandback inspired cabled frames will remain in place as a datum that records the dynamic movement of the plant communities over time preserving a physical form of remembrance.