Photo © Martha Schwartz

Jacob Javits Plaza

Description

Located in the heart of New York City's civic center, the Jacob Javits Plaza (a.k.a. Federal Plaza) is at the intersection of several diverse communities. The one acre plaza of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building at Foley Square serves both as an open-air entryway to the building and as a public park drawing users from the nearby residential neighborhoods of Tribeca, Chinatown, and Battery Park City.

Constructed, 1969

Renovation, 1997

After the removal of Tilted Arc, landscape artist Martha Schwartz re-designed the plaza. Martha Schwartz benches were the first project after Tilted arc was removed. Other artworks connected with building include A Study in Five Planes/Peace (1965) by Alexander Calder and the Manhattan Sentinels (1996) by Beverly Pepper. In the James L. Watson Court of International Trade can be found Metropolis (1967) by Seymour Fogel and Eagle/Justice Above All Else (1970) by Theodore Roszak.

Renovation, 2013

Michael Van Valkenburgh's redesign of the plaza attempts to balance its identity as both an intimate public space and a reflection of the larger civic landscape of Foley Square.

#Infrastructure

#Public Space

#Urban Plaza

2013 - Renovation

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2013 - Renovation - Images

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The scale on the ground is intimate

Combining elements of a public square and a garden

A GSA project to be funded by President Obama's 2009 stimulus package

The plaza is organized with four mounded, sinusoidal plant beds.

The organic forms embrace buttery marble benches'some discs, others rectangular slabs.

A fountain emerges from the pavement on the northeast corner.

The grayness of the site in the winter, ends in the spring with an explosion of blooms on the Saucer Magnolia Trees

The marble on the benches were handpicked from a Vermont quarry.

The cobbles, patterned to be a 'jazzy riff' on the woven checkerboard facade of the Federal Building, help soften the space.

Public plazas are difficult to design and program'in-between spaces that are neither park nor street.

1997 - Renovation

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1997 - Renovation - Images

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After Tilted Arc was removed, GSA retained award-winning landscape architect Martha Schwartz to redesign Foley Square Plaza.

The plaza is an open space with distinctive features such as the six-foot tall, grassy hemispherical topiaries

Hand rails with spiral designs run along the stairs leading from the street level to the plaza.

Schwartz used bright colors in components of her design

Green curvilinear benches placed in a serpentine pattern around the topiaries

Orange mesh trashcans.

By 2008, the roof membrane of the 40-year-old garage below the plaza was failing. To fix it, Schwartz's design had to be removed.

1997 - Renovation - Drawings and documents

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