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The High Line opens its newest and final section, the Spur

2019-06-12T15:02:00-04:00

The widest open space of the High Line opened [...], marking the completion of the wildly popular elevated park. A 16-foot bronze sculpture by Simone Leigh anchors the new section, called the Spur, which offers vistas in every direction. The Spur is a 420-foot section that extends over the intersection of 10th Avenue at West 30th Street.

"The design of the Spur has gone through many iterations over the years: from theater, to garden, to woodland, to event platform, to an immersive ‘bowl,’ among others," said James Corner, who led the design of the Spur, as well as other sections of the High Line, in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Planting Designer Piet Oudolf.

View this post on Instagram “Brick House”.
A post shared by Timothy Schenck (@timothyschenck) on Apr 7, 2019 at 3:12pm PDT

"But we ended up with the best solution, typical High Line: tough, simple, and authentic. Leaving the large lofted space of the Coach Passage, you enter the Spur through a lush woodland, which opens into a large clearing with large-scale artwork on the Plinth. This dramatic space is flanked by generous seating and overlooks and immerses you in the massive scale of the surrounding city."

"The Spur opens new vistas to and from the city and visually reconnects the High Line back to the 10th Avenue Overlook...

Miami begins construction on the Underline, a 10-mile urban path under the city's Metrorail

2018-11-16T15:03:00-05:00

Since opening, the High Line has become the proverbial example of how cities can transform their underutilized nooks and crannies into vibrant public spaces. Now attracting more than six million visitors a year, the railway-turned-park has inspired a host of similar projects all across the world from Seoul to London.

Whereas the High Line focused on the reuse of a historic rail line, a new project in Miami, which broke ground earlier this month, is applying the same concept to the space underneath. Designed by James Corner Field Operations, Miami's forthcoming Underline will create a 10-mile linear park beneath the city's Metrorail.

The project was first inspired when Meg Daly, who came to found the non-profit Friends of the Underline, got into a bicycling accident. Unable to drive, Daly started taking the Miami Metrorail and using the space u...

Zaha Hadid Architects design H-Line hat for Friends of the High Line fundraiser

2018-06-12T15:26:00-04:00

It's only been a few months since Zaha Hadid Architects' 520 West 28th development officially opened in Manhattan, and with its photogenic steel-and-glass split level facade, the 11-story condo mid-rise has quickly become a popular landmark of the adjacent High Line park.

520 West 28th, ZHA's first project in New York City. Photo: Hufton+Crow.

For an upcoming Hat Party-themed fundraiser event, hosted by Friends of the High Line, Patrik Schumacher and his team have fired up the parametric design engines one more time and created the head covering complimenting the building, the H-Line.

Photo: Luke Hayes

"The fluid chevrons of 520 West 28th’s façade weave up the building, conveying its split levels and demarcating each residence within," explains the design description. "The H-Line hat echoes these chevrons, weaving around the wearer with open and closed forms."

Photo: Luke Hayes

Project Details:
Designer: Zaha Hadid Architects
Design: Patrik Schumacher
De...

Harvard GSD awards The High Line with 2017 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design

2018-02-21T15:47:00-05:00

Harvard GSD awarded the 13th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design to The High Line in New York. The Green Prize committee awarded the $50,000 prize to the Friends of the High Line for their continued stewardship behind the project, which has long been hailed as a model example of urban revitalization and collaboration.

In 2004, the Friends of the High Line and the City of New York selected James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf to design the linear public park. Stretching a mile and a half on a freight rail 30 feet above Manhattan's streets, the “floating promenade” welcomes over 8 million visitors and hosts over 450 public programs every year.

Photo: Timothy Schenck, via The High Line/Facebook.

In selecting the winner, the 2017 Green Prize jury traveled to all the finalist projects. They chose to award The High Line “not only for its exceptional design quality, but also because it was a cooperatively-orchestrated, multifaceted endeavor in wh...

The High Line launches new network platform to help future parks avoid their mistakes

2017-06-21T15:24:00-04:00

Now, Hammond has embarked on a new project: the High Line Network, an organization, which just launched a brand new website. Its aim? To help cities working on their industrial adaptive reuse projects learn from the High Line’s stumbles–and from each other.

In many ways, the High Line has been an undeniable success. Phenomenally popular, it has become one of the leading attractions in New York and has brought about a massive wave of development to the area. The flip side of this however, if not yet obvious, is that the project has also been lodged with complaints of spurring gentrification in the surrounding neighborhoods and has become emblematic of the widening class divide existing in the city.

Many of those involved in its creation have begun to express some remorse over the unintended consequences that have come about from the adaptive reuse project. With new variations on the idea popping up, from Seoul's new Skygarden to MAD's repurposing of dilapidated rail yards in MIlan, Robert Hammond, one of the founders of Friends of the High Line, has embarked on a new project, the High Line Network. The goal of the organization is to create a platform for new infrastructural re-use projects to share information so that they can avoid so...

New Renderings of Bjarke Ingels’ High Line Towers Show Crowns and Amenity Bridges

2016-08-10T17:31:00-04:00

In November 2015, Bjarke Ingels‘ released images of a pair of asymmetric, twisting towers along the High Line at 76 Eleventh Avenue then at the beginning of this year, the design changed to a simpler silhouette with more space in between the two buildings. Now it has been revealed through another group of renderings glass crowns at the 300- and 400-foot tops, the retail podium and plaza fronting the High Line, and two amenity-filled podium bridges that will connect the towers.

Hyperloop, but for New York City's trash

2016-02-04T13:43:00-05:00

[A former sanitation policy director for New York City, Ben] Miller is working with his partners at the planning firm Closed Loops, with funding from state grants, to bring pneumatic tubes to New York’s High Line. Rather than rotting in landfills, carrot peels and apple cores from nearby restaurants could travel under the feet of unsuspecting tourists through pneumatic tubes hung below the elevated park. A small facility could turn them into compost right there in the neighborhood.

More on garbage disruption and the very pressing problem of waste management worldwide:

Something like a new golden age of public art in NYC

2015-12-18T09:06:00-05:00

I hate this historical turn, which for me is contained most neatly in the High Line...The trend I mean is this: toward ersatz, privatized public spaces built by developers; sterile, user-friendly, cleansed adult playgrounds with generic environments that produce the innocuous stupor of elevator music; inane urban utopias with promenades, perches, pleasant embellishments, rest stops, refreshments, and compliance codes.

Jerry Saltz analyzes how the rise of bad, privatized public spaces has actually been great for public art. However, these "nightmares of synthetic space" bring with them significant downsides such as a loss of "quietness, slowness, whimsy, stillness, different rhythms, anything uneasy, aimless, inner-directed, accidental, odd...room for silence".

Pneumatic garbage tubes to be installed under NYC's High Line

2015-08-27T13:17:00-04:00

The Related Companies, the city’s largest developer, plans to “tube up” the residential towers in Hudson Yards, its massive real estate development atop the MTA’s west side rail yard. The first large-scale pneumatic waste network to be constructed in the US since Roosevelt Island’s, it will serve 5,000 apartments in six buildings, the first of which is scheduled for completion in 2018.

The scenic High Line may soon host more than tourists and weekenders: a proposed scheme to introduce pneumatic garbage tubes into a series of Manhattan apartment buildings includes using the underside of the former elevated rail line to mount the tubes (the rendering below pictures them in purple).