Design Brooklyn by Anne Hellman

Author:Anne Hellman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2013-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Vintage Meets Nouvel

JANE’S CAROUSEL

The idea to place a classic carousel on the banks of the East River in Dumbo was born in the 1980s, when developer David Walentas was asked by the city to plan a state-owned waterfront park. Architect Ben Thompson introduced the carousel concept, but it would take many years and a number of iterations for the park, now called Brooklyn Bridge Park, to come to life. When Jane’s Carousel opened in 2011, a 1922 work of restoration had found a new home—inside a stunning modern structure designed by the internationally renowned architect Jean Nouvel.

“Designing a building in one of the most beautiful sites in the city—between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge, facing Manhattan—was a challenge in itself,” states Ateliers Jean Nouvel. “At the same time, Jane’s Carousel is one of the loveliest historic carousels in America. Our architecture had to protect it while revealing and enhancing it.”

The contrast of the two structures, one inside the other, serves to accentuate the individual, distinctive beauties of each. The carousel, built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1922, was in rare good condition when David’s wife, Jane Walentas, found it in Idora Park in Youngstown, Ohio. But it had sixty years of park paint on it and needed to be restored. Walentas, an artist trained in graphic design and printmaking, used X-Acto blades, preserving the original paint layer with a shellac barrier, and then made plans to repaint it as close to the original colors as possible. The process required more than twenty years of research, scraping, and careful documentation with drawings, photos, and precise color matches.

From the beginning, Jane Walentas wanted a modern design for the shelter that would house the carousel. She says, “The site called for a sophisticated structure rather than a stereotypical reproduction. It was important for the carousel to be taken out of the realm of an ordinary amusement park ride.” David Walentas had brought Jean Nouvel on board during a second planning phase for Brooklyn Bridge Park.

What Ateliers Jean Nouvel proposed was at first quite radical: a transparent acrylic cube rather than the cylindrical shape one might immediately imagine. As its purpose was to be a protective shelter and not to overshadow the carousel, the architects related the structure to the architecture of warehouses and industrial buildings so prevalent in Brooklyn. An ode to Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront, the building Ateliers Jean Nouvel innovated evokes the right metaphor for both the carousel and the site itself: a jewel held delicately in its elegant box, a meeting point of the old and the new.

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