April 22–May 21, 2023

The Block House
on Governors Island,
New York City

BQE 2053
Exhibit 





About

The BQE 2053 Exhibit brought together design proposals from the Institute for Public Architecture’s 2020 and 2022 Fellowships that explore a radical re-imagining of the entire Brooklyn-Queens Expressway corridor.

The proposals include pragmatic solutions such as diverting truck traffic to rail and maritime routes, as well as visionary proposals such as reforesting the entire length of the highway. The exhibit also features BQE animations by Adam Paul Susaneck (Segregation by Design), aerial footage of the Gowanus and Prospect Expressways by Ines Leong (L-INES), and selected excerpts from IPA Fellowship panel discussions.

The exhibit ran from April 22nd to May 21st at the Block House on Governors Island and is open weekends from 12pm–4pm. The exhibit is free to attend and no registration is required. ︎︎︎See images from the exhibit




Fellowship Programs

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), built by Robert Moses in the 1950s, has been slowly falling apart. Decades of deferred maintenance have contributed to the need for an enormous and expensive repair project. While local community groups have been advocating for a holistic rethinking of the BQE corridor for years, the recently passed federal infrastructure bills, which include over $4 billion for reconnecting communities negatively affected by urban highways, have provided impetus for the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) to look to securing federal funding for repairs of the crumbling BQE. In Fall 2022, the NYC DOT began a strategic review of the BQE corridor in order to ‘move quickly towards a long-term fix’ for the BQE, with a focus on repairs, rather than a radical re-thinking.

The IPA investigation into what can be done with this aging piece of Moses infrastructure asks: How can we possibly justify pouring billions of dollars into merely repairing the BQE? Moreover, how can we use this ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to radically rethink the highway altogether and, in the process, mitigate climate change, redress historic environmental injustice, and significantly improve quality of life for all New Yorkers?

In 2020, IPA ‘To Be or Not to BQE’ Fellows developed alternative futures for the decaying roadway, including pragmatic solutions such as diverting truck traffic to rail and maritime routes, as well as visionary proposals such as reforesting the entire length of the highway.

In 2022, IPA ‘Reconnecting Communities Across the BQE’ Fellows expanded the exploration through engagement with stakeholders in communities along the BQE, working with maps and animations produced by Segregation by Design.






About the IPA

The Institute for Public Architecture, based in the historic Block House on Governors Island, uses design to address social and physical inequities in the city through our signature Fall Fellowship and Summer Residency programs, and related public lectures, exhibits, and publications.

For more information, contact: info@the-ipa.org







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