Amanda Burden - Career

Career

She worked with the architecture firm Gruzen & Partners and one of her mentors was William H. Whyte, the urbanologist, with whom she worked on his Project for Public Spaces.

From 1983 until 1990 Ms. Burden was Vice President for Planning and Design of the Battery Park City Authority. She was responsible for the development and implementation of design guidelines for the 92-acre (370,000 m2) site as well as for overseeing the design of all open spaces and parkland, including the waterfront esplanade. In an interview for New York magazine, she cited her stepfather's influence on her design sensibilities, noting the Canadian black granite she chose for the esplanade was the same stone he selected in 1964 for "Black Rock", the CBS headquarters. Among her other New York projects are the Midtown Community Court and the Red Hook Community Justice Center, which provides integrated legal, economic and social services.

Burden also worked as a public school teaching aide in Harlem in the 1960s.

As New York City's Planning Director, she has spearheaded Mayor Bloomberg's economic development agenda with comprehensive urban design master plans and new initiatives to reclaim the waterfront. She emphasizes open space, continuous shop fronts, and the inclusion of trees and other elements that foster lively street life, according to The New York Times. Burden's meticulous approach has been criticized, however, by some real estate developers, who have stated that she is imperious and arbitrary, using her seat in government to dictate the composition of buildings and insist on architectural innovation. Burden has been a major force in saving the High Line and transforming it into the world-renowned park that it is today.

Eliot Brown writes in The New York Observer, "Now nearly eight years into her tenure, and with the possibility of another four seeming rather likely, Ms. Burden is an increasingly powerful and apparently emboldened force in the Bloomberg administration—one whose often forceful views are imprinted and emblazoned on nearly every major skyscraper, mall, public plaza and large development that rises in city limits."

In 2010, the Bloomberg administration unveiled a draft of "a comprehensive waterfront plan, known as Vision 2020, that includes more than 500 prospective projects costing tens of millions of dollars. These range from efforts to increase access to the water for kayakers and canoeists, to measures to protect against rising sea levels resulting from climate change." Burden, helping present the plan, was quoted as saying the goal of the planning initiative was for the water to become the "sixth borough" of the city. "The water should become a part of our everyday lives," she declared.