Teardrop Park
With Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and Ann Hamilton Battery Park City, New York, New York
Completed 2004
Teardrop Park geologic section along north park pathway
Teardrop Park (1999—2004) is a second project together with the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and Ann Hamilton. Here the artwork lies embedded within the physical and visual structure of rock, water, earth, and plant where three bluestone sections evoke a sense of geologic flux and transition between present time (now) and past time (then). While recalling a natural history of the Hudson River Valley, these sections might also recall the processes of quarrying or of stone masonry. But this stonework neither comes from nor belongs to any of those things. And because it was never any other built thing; the stonework is not a ruin.
Lift, thrust, fold, fault, drop, scrape, erode. The rendering of geologic incident throughout Teardrop Park is not anti-form but is also not yet or not quite form. It is a becoming of or coming to form that makes real our relation to landscape as well as our relation to art.
Park location (upper left corner)
Aerial view
Stone wall (left) and tunnel entrance to south park (right) by MVVA
North park marsh (left), south park pathway (right)
Tunnel entrance facing north (left), south park play area (right)
South park play area
North park
Related reading
A Chip Off the Old Park, by David W. Dunlap in The New York Times, September 30, 2004
Art for Teardrop Park, unpublished statement by Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil, March 2005
Under Construction: Teardrop Park, Battery Park City, New York, NY, by Catherine Spaeth in Dialogue, The Art, Architecture and Design Journal of the Heartland, September-October 2003