In general, the sites we visited on today’s trip were made up of many different pieces and parts. The Esplanade and Chelsea Piers Park were odd composites of different styles, and in particular, both Teardrop Park and Governors Island were defined by different zones. The many different parts within each site fit together with varying amounts of success, and I was particularly struck by the experience of walking through the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City. Starting at the main entrance, the lines on the walls and the text lead you in and make an interesting contrast with the stone of the walls ahead of you. As you enter, you move from light to dark to light again, the dark serving to wipe the visual slate clean and transition you from the city into the memorial. From there, the path winds back and forth up the slope, imitating perhaps a natural landscape, but also serving to keep the eye moving within the site as opposed to outward. When you reach the top, the experience is made all the more interesting by the contrast between the memorial and the city around it. Walking up, you can see almost nothing rising above the slope because the waterfront is undeveloped there, but when you reach the top and turn around the experience is quite different, and you see both the site and its larger context. There were certain aspects about the memorial that I did not like, the fact that it was a tad too neat to be truly immersive and truly believable for one, but I was struck by the whole journey that you take through the memorial and how each part along the way was integrated well with the whole.
