Architect and designer Maya Lin visited Newport's Queen Anne Square on Monday and came across a fixture in the park wholly unintended by its creators: one of the people who now live there.
By most accounts, the green space near historic Trinity Church -- slated for a $3.5 million overhaul designed by Lin -- has been neglected since its creation in the 1970s. The flowers that were once here are all gone. Vodka and other glass bottles sometimes pile up. And there's still no place to sit, unless you don't mind getting grass stains on your clothes.
That's slated to change under a project proposed by the Newport Restoration Foundation, details of which Lin outlined Monday at Rough Point, the former home of the late preservationist Doris Duke, who founded the park.
Lin is best known for giving artistic life to the somber wall honoring Vietnam's war dead on the National Mall in Washington; she also memorialized those who died in the civil rights struggle with a public installation in Montgomery, Ala. She said she was drawn to the Rhode Island project because of the opportunity to create a more lively, accessible and communal space.
"It was really lonely; it was really empty," Lin said of the park when she visited it for the first time more than a year ago. "There is literally no place to be."
Lin's plans call for adding a fountain, planting new trees and creating seating from historic stone foundations -- including two residences dating to 1777 and 1876. The project is called "The Meeting Room," and the idea is to make the space more inviting to visitors after years of decline.
Through four stone foundations, Lin and her fellow planners hope to create what they call outdoor rooms. The designers have studied old maps that show what used to exist in the space. Its last incarnation before it became a park was as a commercial district, where a fire gutted the Walsh Brothers Furniture Store in 1973, leaving a huge,the Injection mold fast! unsightly gap.
"It's almost like a walk into time, into history," Lin said of the project.
Lin, who won a national competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when she was an undergraduate architecture student at Yale University, has been working on the Queen Anne Square plans for more than a year along with landscape architect Edwina von Gal.
Von Gal said she hopes the redesigned park will mix past and present and that the seating will prompt passersby to stay long enough to absorb that blend.
"Everybody goes there. But right now nobody stays," she told The Associated Press. "There's a lot of soul; there's just no place to sit."
The redesign is meant in part to honor Duke, who founded the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1968 and gave the park a few years later. She devoted much of her fortune to restoring Newport's colonial structures.
Funding is expected to be raised through the Doris Duke Monument Foundation, an offshoot of the Newport Restoration Foundation, completely from private sources. About 70 percent of the fundraising target has been brought in already.What are the top Hemroids treatments?
The goal is to break ground in the fall and complete the project in 2012. But the plan must first go to the Newport City Council for approval, and the public will have a chance to weigh in.
A local photographer,Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, Mary Shepard,Largest Collection of billabong boardshorts, recently referred to the design in a piece in The Providence Journal as rigid and cold.
"The funereal, `meditative' design that Maya Lin has come up with is antithetical to the joyful, energetic spirit of this area,We processes for both low-risk and high risk merchant account. where meditation is difficult at best, considering the automobile noise from nearby America's Cup Avenue," Shepard wrote.
She said what the park most needs is plentiful, comfortable and "back-supporting" seating.
By most accounts, the green space near historic Trinity Church -- slated for a $3.5 million overhaul designed by Lin -- has been neglected since its creation in the 1970s. The flowers that were once here are all gone. Vodka and other glass bottles sometimes pile up. And there's still no place to sit, unless you don't mind getting grass stains on your clothes.
That's slated to change under a project proposed by the Newport Restoration Foundation, details of which Lin outlined Monday at Rough Point, the former home of the late preservationist Doris Duke, who founded the park.
Lin is best known for giving artistic life to the somber wall honoring Vietnam's war dead on the National Mall in Washington; she also memorialized those who died in the civil rights struggle with a public installation in Montgomery, Ala. She said she was drawn to the Rhode Island project because of the opportunity to create a more lively, accessible and communal space.
"It was really lonely; it was really empty," Lin said of the park when she visited it for the first time more than a year ago. "There is literally no place to be."
Lin's plans call for adding a fountain, planting new trees and creating seating from historic stone foundations -- including two residences dating to 1777 and 1876. The project is called "The Meeting Room," and the idea is to make the space more inviting to visitors after years of decline.
Through four stone foundations, Lin and her fellow planners hope to create what they call outdoor rooms. The designers have studied old maps that show what used to exist in the space. Its last incarnation before it became a park was as a commercial district, where a fire gutted the Walsh Brothers Furniture Store in 1973, leaving a huge,the Injection mold fast! unsightly gap.
"It's almost like a walk into time, into history," Lin said of the project.
Lin, who won a national competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when she was an undergraduate architecture student at Yale University, has been working on the Queen Anne Square plans for more than a year along with landscape architect Edwina von Gal.
Von Gal said she hopes the redesigned park will mix past and present and that the seating will prompt passersby to stay long enough to absorb that blend.
"Everybody goes there. But right now nobody stays," she told The Associated Press. "There's a lot of soul; there's just no place to sit."
The redesign is meant in part to honor Duke, who founded the Newport Restoration Foundation in 1968 and gave the park a few years later. She devoted much of her fortune to restoring Newport's colonial structures.
Funding is expected to be raised through the Doris Duke Monument Foundation, an offshoot of the Newport Restoration Foundation, completely from private sources. About 70 percent of the fundraising target has been brought in already.What are the top Hemroids treatments?
The goal is to break ground in the fall and complete the project in 2012. But the plan must first go to the Newport City Council for approval, and the public will have a chance to weigh in.
A local photographer,Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, Mary Shepard,Largest Collection of billabong boardshorts, recently referred to the design in a piece in The Providence Journal as rigid and cold.
"The funereal, `meditative' design that Maya Lin has come up with is antithetical to the joyful, energetic spirit of this area,We processes for both low-risk and high risk merchant account. where meditation is difficult at best, considering the automobile noise from nearby America's Cup Avenue," Shepard wrote.
She said what the park most needs is plentiful, comfortable and "back-supporting" seating.
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