Along the Emerald Necklace, Boston

The Emerald Necklace is the only remaining intact linear park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. It was an early green infrastructure project, as Olmstead utilized the existing Muddy River to create a linear park while preserving the area’s hydrological function. Yet by 1995 new pieces of infrastructure such as traffic intersections had rendered parts of the Necklace difficult to access and read. This design attempts to resolve just such an intersection between cars, pedestrians and the Necklace. A new land art piece is created. The path of the water and that of the human are intertwined in a helix. In low tide, people and water walk side by side. In high tide, humans must give way to water, learning and respecting its rhythms. I would no longer propose this scale of change to a historic landscape.