New York Magazine covers First Avenue Water Plaza

Nov 7, 2019

In this week’s New York Magazine, architecture critic Justin Davidson wrote about SCAPE’s First Avenue Water Plaza at the base of the American Copper Buildings—in particular, a sense of “liveliness, mutability, and natural change” flowing down into the Plaza.

“With its planted hillocks, artfully placed boulders, and long wood-slat benches resting on bases of weathered steel, this is a little patch of Arcadia moated by traffic … SCAPE has managed to carve a charming pocket wilderness, complete with a trail of flagstones that cross an artificial stream,” Davidson writes of the project.

The article hones in on SHoP Architects’ use of copper cladding on the buildings above—towers treated “as if they were a dancer’s legs, both bending at the knee but in different directions”—as a welcome return to the legacy building materials of New York.

You can read the piece here, and read more about the project here.