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The specter of climate change looms large over the New York City metropolitan region, where, by 2050, it is estimated that the sea level may rise by up to 19 inches, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Confronting this threat requires significant investments in the transformation of urban waterfront areas into resilient landscapes that act as buffers between the built and natural environments. While formidable, such interventions can also offer opportunities to introduce much-needed parks and civic architecture. Two projects, Gansevoort Peninsula on Manhattan’s West Side and ResilienCity Park, across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, fit that bill. Both feature  community-centric landscaping and public pavilions, the latter both designed by Brooklyn-based 2004 Design Vanguard nARCHITECTS.

Gansevoort Peninsula joins several parks administered by the Hudson River Park Trust. Photo © Iwan Baan

“Each project has a set of unique contexts and challenges to be considered, but broadly, resiliency planning cannot only focus on protecting investments to weather the next storm,” says nARCHITECTS co-founding partner Mimi Hoang. “Project teams need to create multifaceted returns on investment through solutions which serve several goals simultaneously, and during non-emergency events.”

The ResilienCity Park pavilion is clad in vertically-oriented, stepped granite panels. Photo © Iwan Baan

Perforated steel screens shade the pavilion and its immediate surroundings. Photo © Iwan Baan

The Gansevoort Park Pavilion, which opened in October 2024, serves as a maintenance facility and comfort station on the eastern edge of the Field Operations–designed Gansevoort Peninsula (2023). The 5.5-acre Gansevoort Peninsula is one of several parks, like Little Island, developed by the Hudson River Park Trust within the larger Manhattan Waterfront Greenway. Across the river, in Hoboken, the other pavilion, which opened earlier this year, stands centrally within the 5.4-acre ResilienCity Park (2023), where OLIN’s landscape design blends active and passive recreational spaces, like bioswales and a playground.

Riffing off Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 Days End installation at the long-demolished Pier 52, the Gansevoort Park Pavilion is composed of three individual volumes with large openings between them. The arrangement is intended to evoke the artist’s architectural incisions, while providing breezeways and viewpoints through to the Hudson River. The three structures, two of which are used for park maintenance and one as public restrooms, are united by a single, thin-concrete canopy, and topped individually with rainwater-absorbing vegetation.

The largest resiliency park in New Jersey populates a former riverfront industrial site. Photo © Iwan Baan

Similarly, in ResilienCity, nARCHITECTS split the program into two, rectangular volumes. One houses restrooms and a community space, and the other a café. They are shrouded above by a pergola-like perforated steel shade. It is hung from a framework of exposed structural steel, painted a light blue, that, at set points, opens to circular oculi of varying diameters to make room for structural columns. Climbing plants on those columns create, what the design team calls, “Dr. Seuss trees,” connecting the structure to OLIN’s surrounding landscape design. Notably, the pavilion, like much of the park, is raised several feet above the abutting streets to make room for detention tanks below, which can hold roughly a million gallons of stormwater.

The Gansevoort Peninsula pavilion opens to offer direct sightlines to the Hudson. Photo © Michael Moran

A concrete canopy suspends above the pavilion, and offers shade. Photo © Iwan Baan

Both constructions, located within floodplains and subject to the wear and tear of park goers, required durable materials that are easy to maintain and replace. Each is supported by 10-inch-thick, cast-in-place concrete walls that pull double duty as interior wall finishes. At the Gansevoort Pavilion, the exterior walls are clad in perforated, ultra-high performance concrete panels, which are backlit for a lamp-like effect during evening hours. The Hudson River Palisades, cliffs abutting the inland boundaries of Hoboken, were the main point of reference for cladding of the ResilienCity Park Pavilion. There, vertically oriented and stepped granite panels face the two volumes.

In each circumstance, nARCHITECTS collaborated closely with the respective park’s landscape architects and the public, through numerous community engagement sessions, to create multiple design iterations. In the case of Gansevoort Peninsula, the location of the pavilion shifted from the park center to the street edge, to make room for disparate uses like a soccer pitch, a rocky beach with direct river access for non-motorized boaters, and a dog run. The pavilion in Hoboken was initially envisioned as just a rest station, but based on community input, the design team successfully encouraged the municipal government to expand the scope of work to include its flexible community space and café (though nARCHITECTS had hoped to also include a small branch of the local library).

Lighting placed behind perforated concrete panels creates a lamp-like effect. Photo © Iwan Baan

“It’s a balancing act between many different interests, and, when weighing the constraints of a site, something of a three-dimensional puzzle,” notes Hoang.

There is plenty of work to be done to strengthen resiliency in coastal areas like Manhattan and Hoboken, but, the sum of these smaller scale projects can go a long way.