You Might Also Like: Insights: Art and Architecture

**Victoria Newhouse** (0:00)
Welcome to Insights, conversations with creators in art and architecture. I'm Victoria Newhouse.
James Corner is one of the world's foremost landscape architects. Based in New York City, his celebrated projects around the globe include Chicago's redeveloped Navy Pier, London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and New York's High Line, a one and a half mile park built atop an abandoned railroad that attracts more visitors than the Metropolitan Museum or even the Statue of Liberty. James was born in Manchester, England, before moving to the US and attending the School of Architecture at University of Pennsylvania, where he later chaired the landscape program for 10 years and made pen design famous. In 1998, he founded Field Operations, which soon became one of the most successful landscape architecture firms in the world. He has won innumerable awards, many given for the first time to a landscape architect. James Corner is a theoretician, the author of numerous books, as well as an enormously influential practitioner.
James, hello.

**James Corner** (1:21)
Victoria.

**Victoria Newhouse** (1:21)
Do you realize it was in 2018 when we actually met?

**James Corner** (1:27)
It was that long ago.

**Victoria Newhouse** (1:29)
Yes. Isn't that amazing? It seems like yesterday.

**James Corner** (1:31)
Well, you haven't changed by the looks of it.

**Victoria Newhouse** (1:34)
Well, you haven't changed either.

**James Corner** (1:38)
You look fabulous.

**Victoria Newhouse** (1:39)
Thank you. Thank you. Shall we start?

**James Corner** (1:42)
Yes, go ahead.

**Victoria Newhouse** (1:44)
In 2018, when we met, you were working on Fresh Kills, a four-mile park in Staten Island. It will replace what was the biggest garbage dump in the world, actually visible from outer space. Fresh Kills is scheduled to open in phases through the next 10 years.
Now that huge area has been detoxified and its expanse of wild grasses and biodiversity seem like a rural Midwestern farmland with a site, with amazing views of Manhattan. James, can you share with us some of the ideas that motivated you for Fresh Kills?

**James Corner** (2:29)
Yes. Well, first, let me say what a great honor it is to be speaking with you again, Victoria, and to thank you for your own advocacy of landscape architecture and your genuine interest in parks and open spaces. Your books, your writings, your podcasts are a fabulous platform for communicating to people what it is that landscape architects do.
So thank you for all of that.

**Victoria Newhouse** (2:58)
Thank you, James. It's very kind of you.

**James Corner** (3:01)
With regards to Fresh Kills, you're absolutely right. It was the world's largest landfill. It's where all the trash and waste from Manhattan and surrounding neighborhoods was shipped by barge and then piled up into huge hills, almost mountain-like hills on a marshland on the western side of Staten Island. You say that that area has been detoxified. Well, that's not exactly true. It's a long process of management that the New York City Department of Sanitation must undertake to continually manage that closed landfill. You ask what the ideas that motivated it, that's partly it.
It's less about design, it's more about curating management in such a way that the health, ecological health, the vitality, the health and safety and welfare of this vast landscape can be brought back for people to enjoy.
One of the issues there is simply its vastness, and it's hard to fathom four square miles, but that is actually three times or nearly three times the size of Olmsted's Central Park in New York City. How do you possibly begin to generate or create or grow a new landscape here, a new ecology, an ecology of biodiversity that would be healthy and welcoming and inviting and safe for people to visit and to use? The second thought was, how do we retain something about this strangeness, the strange aesthetic properties of this vast landscape that is at one hand engineered and technological, and on the other hand, natural, strangely natural? But how do we create a place that really strikes people at the level of aesthetic experience that they are drawn into the curiosity of the place, into the strangeness of its vibe, if you will?

**Victoria Newhouse** (5:25)
Well, since we met and since you started work at Fresh Kills, I have visited the one part of it that opened in 2023, in fact. It's called North Park, as you know.
It continues that natural feel that you established at the outset for the whole park. In the course of my visit, I was absolutely thrilled by the bird tower, which I loved climbing up to, to see the magnificent views. Also, I liked the seed farm, which was cultivating plants indigenous to the area. Can you talk a little bit about that first opening to the public?