Prospect Park

Right in the heart of one of America's most densely populated urban areas, in Brooklyn, New York, sits an exquisite public space, Prospect Park, encompassing 585 acres of meadows, woods and lakes. Created some 150 years ago, the park still maintains the qualities achieved by its acclaimed designers; Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert B. Vaux, who also built New York's Central Park. Despite Central Park's acclaim they considered Prospect Park their masterpiece, designing it to be a place of great beauty, a rural refuge with a sense of nature and wilderness and filled with healthful clean air. Today the park's new Lakeside Centre Facility, designed by the aware-winning architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and scheduled to open in January 2013, continues the goals of the park's original creators. Prospect Park: The Evolution of Olmsted and Vaux's Urban Jewel is the first monograph on this designed landscape, providing a fascinating overview of the park's colourful history and present. Including a wealth of archival and contemporary imagery and insightful text, the book is not only a document of one of the most beloved spaces in New York City, but sets, in its description of Prospect Park's restoration philosophy, an example for how to restore a historic landscape.