Chunqi Fang, May 16th

Today was cloudy and rainy. The first video I chose was recorded at Brooklyn Bridge Park. This video shows different layers of people’s activity around waterfront area in different speeds. The nearest layer was ourselves, we were sitting on stairs and watching ships and the skyline of Manhattan. The speed of our movement was quite slow. The second layer was the people jogging along the river. They moved quite fast in the video and disappeared at the other side of the camera quickly. The third layer would be the ships traveling on the river. They moved fast but the result was slow in the camera due to long distance between them form where we were. The fourth layer was the cars and people on the opposite side of the river. Their movement was not clear. They move without noise. They became a part of the background of the scene. The last layer was the skyline of Manhattan, Statue of Liberty and Staten Island. They were still image without any movement. The variation of people’s activity was very clear depicted by this angle.

One thing to add, compare to Hudson River Park, this park didn’t solve the noise from roadways very well. When we went through the park, it was always noisy on the road side. Although the designer tried to solve this issue by use artificial highland to create sound barrier between park and road. The result did not perform very well because the noise was still loudly enough.

The second video was took place at Prospect Park. The angle was from where we were standing towards the top of the forest there. Due to different velocity of wind, the shape of the trees changed slowly or drastically. The whole process was very dynamic. The top of the trees changed the shape of sky when they were flowed by wind. It was peaceful and beautiful. Because you cannot forecast what will be the next step of its movement at all. For me, I felt there were two factors in Prospect Park: trees and wind. Everything else in the city was cleaned out from this space. The pure green nature showed us the simplest relationship between nature and creatures: action and reaction. In my opinion, this video is a simple and clear way to depict this concept.

After this, we had a lot of fine at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens Visitor Center. The designer treat the relationship between buildings and site very cleverly with slope green roof, stairs and landscape. The artificial landscape hill was a very clever design to create sound barrier between Visitor Center and Parking Plot. On the hill, there were many plants and landscapes. People can also have a very good view of the park, which was very nice.