NY Reticula rests on Governors Island Park, a privileged site with a number of historic buildings in the process of being restored, and which has also become home to exciting landscape interventions looking to preserve and enhance the unique characteristics of the site.

In this evolving ecosystem, NY Reticula is set forth as a continuation of the park; it is a grid, but a grid that sits on a rolling land without the will to connect or divide or organize. Its design departs from the orthogonal intersection of lines that define and delimit quadrants in between, but deforms this instrument of urban planning to adapt to the topography of land and to its wider context. It deforms and, while doing so, subverts the idea of the grid, so that quadrants are no longer parcels but voids filled with air and views.

As if extracted from the island’s bedrock, NY Reticula resounds with the geology of the site. Granite rocks from the island’s old seawall that were used to build the park are here used again to conglomerate the cyclopean concrete. The spaces are sometimes closer to what we understand as natural and others as architectural. This intriguing ambiguity pushes users to actively explore and interpret, invent and enjoy...[+][+]