PennPraxis is collaborating with landscape architecture office, OLIN with on-site investigations and the conceptual design of Quarry Waters Park in Kingston City, New York.
The Quarry Waters Park is located on a historically important industrial site that led Hudson Valley’s brick and cement production from the 1850s-1990s. The main ambition of this project is to transform this post-industrial site into a multi-layered public amenity that serves both the local community in Kingston and tourists moving through the region.
To this end, there are several objectives which must be achieved: inclusion of the diverse communities and backgrounds that exist in Kingston; economic engagement with the local population in order to benefit the wellbeing and opportunities of Kingston’s citizens; the creation of green jobs through promoting innovation and sustainable energies on site; and finally, the acknowledgment of the site’s history in the park's design. To achieve this vision, the PennPraxis team will research, analyze, and represent the events and processes that shaped the site to its current form.
To date, the PennPraxis team has produced timelines that illustrate the precolonial era all the way to the post-industrial landscape, diagrams that explain the workings of the brick and cement industry along the Hudson River, and calculations of the estimated extracted volume of materials from the site since the 19th century. Additionally, PennPraxis has created community and regional mappings to form an inventory of the site’s defining characteristics and potentials.
Throughout this process, PennPraxis will collaborate with the team at Olin to generate interpretative interventions and site-specific content that will unveil this rich background to the visitors and community members that will use the site.
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