The TKF Foundation is a 10-year-old private nonprofit that specializes in creating open, public sanctuaries. Since its founding, TKF has supported the creation of more than 130 Open Space Sacred Places in the Baltimore-Annapolis-Washington area alone.
“We envision a time when every urban community in the U.S. will provide people with opportunities for intimate, intentional daily doses of nearby urban nature through the creation of a system of nature spaces,” says the Foundation’s mission statement.
On May 20, The Naval Cemetery Landscape, a 1.7-acre public space on the site of a former Naval Cemetery on the waterfront in Brooklyn, N.Y., opened. This is the sixth nationally funded site where TKF and its research partners are studying the relationship of nature and human resiliency, and specifically the impact that proximity to nature has on a person’s ability to recover from psychological, social, or physiological stresses.
A team led by Denise Milstein, Director of Columbia University’s Master’s degree program in Sociology, is conducting the study at the cemetery site, which focuses on students of the Brooklyn Green School and on residents of Brooklyn Housing and Community Services.
“It is an excellent example of how green space can foster social cohesion, and the research being done here should offer insights for other city planners on the value such spaces bring to cities and their residents,” said Tom Stoner, TKF’s 81-year-old co-founder.
The Foundation selected the Naval Cemetery Landscape project from 126 that responded to its RFP for a grant. TKF visited more than 30 sites over an 18-month period before making its choice, says Jayne Trentanove, a Foundation spokesperson.
The project is the first open space of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, which when completed will comprise a 27-mile route for pedestrians and cyclists that connects neighborhood parks and open spaces from the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn to Jamaica Bay, Queens.
The Naval Cemetery Landscape’s development was spearheaded by the nonprofit Brooklyn Greenway Initiative in partnership with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation.
“As we approach Memorial Day, we are reminded of the significant military history of the Yard, and through the thoughtful landscape design, we hope to honor those roots,” said David Ehrenberg, President and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Marvel Architects and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects designed the site in a way that respects its history as a burial ground. New York’s Department of State collaborated on this project, in that since 2004 it has awarded five Environmental Protection grants totaling $3,318,000 to the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative and the Brooklyn Borough President’s office.
The former Brooklyn Naval Hospital Cemetery site is located in the southeast corner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The cemetery had been active from 1834 through 1910, and was a burial site for more than 2,000 people. In 1926, the Navy sought to move all remains and inter them at nearby Cypress Hills National Cemetery.
The 1.7-acre Naval Cemetery Landscape is serving as a research site studying the importance of nearby nature of human resiliency, and to evaluate how proximity to landscape affects human well-being. Image: Marvel Architects and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects.
Establishing a legacy
TKF Foundation will be closing its doors in December 2017, says Trentanove. But it has laid the groundwork for future urban landscape and restorative places through the research it has conducted over the years, the open spaces it has helped create, and through its national grant program that has provided $4.5 million for six research projects.
Aside from the naval cemetery site, its other grant projects include:
•The Green Road, a woodlands path that runs through the campus of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. It provides “an oasis of respite” for wounded soldiers and their families, as well as a patient-centered approach to healing;
•A Nature Place in Portland, Ore., where the roof of Legacy Emanuel Medical Center was converted into a 6,500-sf healing and restorative garden that’s open to the public, but whose main purpose is to provide a calming area for the facility’s Cardiovascular ICU and its Family Birthing Center. The effect of that space on patients and their families, on nurses, and on post-partum mothers is being studied;
•TKF has two “Landscapes of Resilience” research sites where the organization and its partners are analyzing how the natural environment can influence and help restore places in crisis. One site—Butterfly Garden & Overlook—is located in Joplin, Mo., on land where homes were wiped out by an E-5 tornado five years ago. A second, under development, is recreating a community garden and large gathering place on the edge of Jamaica Bay in Queens, N.Y. It is located adjacent to two senior citizen housing towers that were severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy;
•TKF is also funding research on why nature improves health outcomes. A team of researchers, led by Marc Berman of the University of Chicago, is evaluating the effects of nature on cognitive functioning. One of the team’s goals is to create a kind of guide that would inform urban planners about what elements they should include in future projects that are most likely to attract people.
A second study, conducted by a team from the University of Illinois at two of TKF’s older sites in Baltimore, is looking at different populations and how spending time in natural settings affects one’s immune system.
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Great Solutions: Green Building
27. Next-Generation Green Roofs Sprout up in New York New York is not particularly known for its green roofs, but two recent projects may put the Big Apple on the map. In spring 2010, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will debut one of the nation's first fully walkable green roofs. Located across from the Juilliard School in Lincoln Center's North Plaza, Illumination Lawn will consist ...
| Aug 11, 2010
Idea Center at Playhouse Square: A better idea
Through a unique partnership between a public media organization and a performing arts/education entity, a historic building in the heart of downtown Cleveland has been renovated as a model of sustainability and architectural innovation. Playhouse Square, which had been working for more than 30 years to revitalize the city's arts district, teamed up with ideastream, a newly formed media group t...
| Aug 11, 2010
Divine intervention
Designed by H. H. Richardson in the 1870s to serve the city's burgeoning Back Bay neighborhood, Trinity Church in the City of Boston would come to represent the essence of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with its clay tile roof, abundant use of polychromy, rough-faced stone, heavy arches, and massive size.
| Aug 11, 2010
Dream Fields, Lone Star Style
How important are athletic programs to U.S. school districts? Here's one leading indicator: In 2005, the National Football League sold 17 million tickets. That same year, America's high schools sold an estimated 225 million tickets to football games, according to the American Football Coaches Association.
| Aug 11, 2010
Gold Award: Eisenhower Theater, Washington, D.C.
The Eisenhower Theater in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., opened in 1971. By the turn of the century, after three-plus decades of heavy use, the 1,142-seat box-within-a-box playhouse on the Potomac was starting to show its age. Poor lighting and tired, worn finishes created a gloomy atmosphere.
| Aug 11, 2010
Giants 300 University Report
University construction spending is 13% higher than a year ago—mostly for residence halls and infrastructure on public campuses—and is expected to slip less than 5% over the next two years. However, the value of starts dropped about 10% in recent months and will not return to the 2007–08 peak for about two years.
| Aug 11, 2010
Reaching For the Stars
The famed Griffith Observatory, located in the heart of the Hollywood hills, receives close to two million visitors every year and has appeared in such films as the classic “Rebel Without a Cause” and the not-so-classic “Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.” Complete with a solar telescope and a 12-inch refracting telescope, multiple scientific exhibits, and one of the world...
| Aug 11, 2010
The Art of Reconstruction
The Old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., completed in 1867, houses two Smithsonian Institution museums—the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum. Collections include portraits of all U.S. presidents, along with paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings of numerous historic figures from American history, and the works of more than 7,000 American artists.
| Aug 11, 2010
Silver Award: Pere Marquette Depot Bay City, Mich.
For 38 years, the Pere Marquette Depot sat boarded up, broken down, and fire damaged. The Prairie-style building, with its distinctive orange iron-brick walls, was once the elegant Bay City, Mich., train station. The facility, which opened in 1904, served the Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad Company when the area was the epicenter of lumber processing for the shipbuilding and kit homebuilding ...
| Aug 11, 2010
Bowing to Tradition
As the home to Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals—the oldest theatrical company in the nation—12 Holyoke Street had its share of opening nights. In April 2002, however, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences decided the 1888 Georgian Revival building no longer met the needs of the company and hired Boston-based architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates to design a more contemporary facility.
