The High Line, New York City’s most exciting and innovative linear park, just opened its second section to the public – and Inhabitat was on the scene to bring you exclusive photos of the new extension! We finally experienced the Falcone Flyover, Viewing Spur, Chelsea Thicket and other exciting new features, and we descended from the experienced with our heads still in the clouds – read on for our exclusive first look at The High Line, Section 2. — Inhabitat

Section 2 of the High Line, which opens to the public tomorrow, passes just beyond Frank Gehry’s IAC building and Jean Nouvel’s 100 11th Avenue Residences one block to the west. With the installation of Sarah Sze’s “Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat),” some of the more modest denizens of the neighborhood will have a piece of starchitecture to call their own. — tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com

But like other architects of his generation, especially those who formed many of their ideas working in Los Angeles’s sprawling suburban maze, Mr. Denari is less interested in perpetuating the myth of the open road than in mining it for new ideas. His work has more to do with exploring adolescent fantasies than with celebrating personal freedom. It suggests a longing for a world — free, open, upwardly mobile — that began to break down more than 30 years ago. — nytimes.com

For all its dynamism, precision and intelligence, there has always been something a bit antiseptic about Denari's work, as if it were hermetically sealed against emotion as well as imperfection. The New York building, with its fluid, digitally derived profile and facade of glass and panels of embossed stainless steel, won't dramatically change that impression. Its design personality is closer to robotic than balletic. — Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times

When you approach the High Line in the Chelsea neighborhood on the lower west side of Manhattan, what you see first is the kind of thing urban parks were created to get away from—a harsh, heavy, black steel structure supporting an elevated rail line that once brought freight cars right into factories and warehouses and that looks, at least from a distance, more like an abandoned relic than an urban oasis. — NGeo