Prospect Park2013
Olmsted and Vaux's Brooklyn masterpiece
by David Colley
Right in the heart of one of America's most densely populated urban areas, in Brooklyn, New York, sits an exquisite public space, Prospect Park, encompassing 585 acres of meadows, woods and lakes. Created some 150 years ago, the park still maintains the qualities achieved by its acclaimed designers; Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert B. Vaux, who also built New York's Central Park. Despite Central Park's acclaim they considered Prospect Park their masterpiece, designing it to be a place of great beauty, a rural refuge with a sense of nature and wilderness and filled with healthful clean air. Today the park's new Lakeside Centre Facility, designed by the award-winning architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and scheduled to open in January 2013, continues the goals of the park's original...