According to Jonah Stern, who serves as Project Manager for the Staten Island park, the strength of the match was clear from the beginning.

“Their vision for LAGI and our vision for Freshkills Park were completely compatible,” he said in an interview with PLANET. “Both are about rethinking the relationship between infrastructure and aesthetics and about creating beauty in unlikely places.”

Like Stern, we eagerly anticipated the creative plans that were to be drawn for a designated 100-acre parcel of the park when PLANET previewed the contest late in 2011. And in contrast to LAGI’s first challenge, which inspired designs that included a pyramid of solar panels and one of malleable thin-film solar clouds meant for a site in the Abu Dhabi desert, many of the 250 entries for the more recent competition took a different approach. Given Freshkills’s proximity to the Arthur Kill tidal strait and its relative closeness to the Atlantic Ocean, it makes sense that the top three submissions selected by a panel of jurors last fall each harnessed energy from the ample wind available at the site.

Those top finishers and other entries will be presented in a book, Regenerative Infrastructures, due in May and will be on display this summer at the Arsenal Gallery in another of New York’s public spaces, Central Park. (Visitors to Dubai can see a current exhibit that opened in conjunction with the start of the World Future Energy Summit earlier this month.) The images and texts tell a story of some pioneering uses of next-stage sustainable technology and the many surprising ways of complimenting nature’s charms with touches of artistic flair.