GANG: There’s the lake, and the river’s really the backyard, you know, of the city, similar to waterways that go through New York. And the opportunity to bring recreational activities, ecological parks, walkways, public space to the water and giving people access for the first time was really transformational. Because, you know, this water is really dirty. And you don’t want to fall in the water. So there was kind of a resistance to letting kids get out on the water and use it.  BELLAFANTE: Was there a pollution remediation component that went on in conjunction with this project?  GANG: Well, the people that were thinking about this thought that you kind of have to simultaneously let people have access to create a constituency so that people actually care about the river. And then, in that way, they will actually be stewards of the river. So simultaneously, the E.P.A., for example, demanded that the city clean sewage water before putting it back into the river.  BELLAFANTE: So your project was really the catalyst for this other one.  GANG: A catalyst for the whole thing. And then parks and public space are something that we all have as common, you know, civic common areas. And so one of the parks that we worked on in Chicago was this Lincoln Park Zoo. And we made it into kind of a biodiverse place where there’s lots of different animals, not just a lawn with trees, but almost like a zoo without cages. So animals would be attracted. But then people are attracted.  Brownsville, for example, in New York, is a place where we just designed this Fire Rescue 2. It’s a fire rescue facility. There’s one per borough. And here it’s about putting a publicly owned building and making it very open and visible and to help revitalize that part of the city.  BELLAFANTE: I want to say for anyone in the audience who’s not familiar with Brownsville, it’s the poorest neighborhood in New York City, has the highest concentration of public housing. Terrible rates of crime. And what this will do to Brownsville is it really will bring something of aesthetic value into a neighborhood that is very, very desolate and very depressing. There are places you can stand in Brownsville and look 360 degrees, and you’ll only see these monolithic public housing towers. Very little new development.  GANG: But, you know, there is community in Brownsville. So when we started designing this, we developed a way of working with people, asking people from the community what they want to have.  BELLAFANTE: And can you talk a little bit about the way you engaged firemen and what you learned about the culture and community of firemen that influenced —  GANG: What we really noticed was the firefighters — they’re actually rescue workers, not firefighters — like to eat together, and they stay there a few days at a time. And they really develop a community. And so they have their own strong community.  But then that also makes them attractive to the neighbors. You feel like you trust a firefighter, a rescue worker. And those doors on the building are often open. And we even put a bench in the front of the building so people can actually sit there instead of taking this approach of creating a fortress, which I think is a contrast to what we see in the design of police stations.  And so really designing this Fire Rescue 2 started me thinking about, are there ways that design could help improve the relationship between community members and police if we looked at the architecture? Not that it can solve everything. But I think, you know, maybe it can be part of that dialogue in creating — relationships between police and community members which are not just the confrontational relationships.
The architect and founder of Studio Gang is using balconies and common areas in tall buildings to give people visual connections.