opens in a new window Squibb Bridge at Brooklyn Bridge Park uses principles of universal design to create outstanding access and million dollar views. It zigzags through tall oaks, between buildings and over a street, descending 30 feet in elevation from its start to endpoint. The 8-foot-wide bridge has gentle slopes, handrails and dramatic vistas of the Manhattan skyline, Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge. The most dramatic piece of universal design in this 85-acre sustainable waterfront park that stretches 1.3 miles along Brooklyn’s East River shoreline is the 396-foot-long Squibb Park Bridge, a pedestrian bridge connecting Squibb Park at the north end of the historic Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates placed so much emphasis on universal design in its creation of Brooklyn Bridge Park that the park’s website has a prominent link that details all of the accessible features on its piers and greenway. Thankfully, a growing number of architects, landscape architects, engineers, town planners and designers are creating warm, welcoming public spaces while embracing universal design as an essential element from Day One.īrooklyn - Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Designs by architects and planners who clearly wish they could seek a zoning variance that absolves them from any responsibility for designing public spaces for people with limited mobility.The only accessibility features are ugly retrofits that accommodate disabled guests, but unacceptably segregate them from the main pedestrian routes that remain impassible to wheelers. A park designed only with nondisabled visitors in mind, with winding staircases, inaccessible water features and barely barrier-free restrooms.A vertical platform wheelchair lift foolishly installed to provide access to beachfront shops and cafes - when the reality is keys that are required to operate the lifts get lost, sea spray rusts parts, and the enclosures around the lifts become filled with garbage or are used as bathrooms by drunken partiers.But anyone who has used a wheelchair for mobility can tell you what it is NOT: Universal design means many things to many people. Mace, founder of the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University. definition by the late architect Ronald L.
Universal Design: “The design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.” Universal Design in Landscape Architecture: Public Spaces for All
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