Arlington County Government, VA Most Recent, 8 Dec 2022

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From YouTube: John Robinson Jr. Town Square

Description

After many years of community input, Arlington's Green Valley neighborhood gets a town square that reflects the areas history and meets the residents needs.

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Yeah we're somewhere in here yeah right now. What led me to take on the project at Green Valley was its history one and its passionate community that wanted to tell their story, and particularly the story of the larger diaspora of free blocks from Arlington Cemetery, then out into Green Valley. The project started as a very simple idea of a Town Square, but as we started meeting with the community, they began to articulate that it was less about the square but more about the larger landscape.

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Once we were LED through the community and talked really about the larger landscape, it became very clear that this space should not be a paved area. It should not be like a plaza or a square, but it should almost feel more like a larger park or garden. So part of the attempt was to connect it to its context, and so we have the school on one side and we have the larger community on the other, and so by making it I guess more green, meaning more trees, more lawn, more landscape elements.

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We then had a way to blend it into the larger community, so we have stone, we have walkways, we have trees, we have lighting and things like that.

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That begin to serve the community and at the center is the focus of the piece is a Monumental element, sculpture that says freed and we had a long discussion in our community meetings about the meaning of freedom versus the idea of being freed and, as we know in the American history, African, Americans or Africans at the time they were freed from the Emancipation, and so there was no arrival at freedom, and this was a a very interesting set of conversations that we had with the community on multiple occasions.

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Talking about that idea, and so as part of the process, then this piece manifest and we have this gilded peace that reflects a time and place about a history.

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But it's also looking forward, and hopefully the process was open that people feel, like their ideas, are represented and, more than anything, I think it's a new resource in the community, and hopefully this will allow people to come back to the site and see their home in a completely different way, and so, through the process, we're hoping that again, we've changed how people will use the site and in turn, how they will actually maintain and actually keep the site in the future.