garden

groundbreaker
JAMES CORNER
A closer look at the avant-garde urbanist's forthcoming High Line
STORY BY DONNA DORIAN
IN THE FOREWORD TO JAMES CORNER AND ALEX MCLEAN'S agenda for the profession — one in which landscape architects,
1997 award-winning book. Taking Measures Across the American working with architects, urban planners and ecologists, lead the
Landscape, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh found way in designing the city of the future.
their ideas tantalizingly comparable in scope to Le Corbusier's call to It's a fascinating concept that the 47-year-old Corner — as the
design buildings as reflections of the machine age. Like Le Corbusier, Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania
Corner is a philosopher of change, who urges us "to take the mea- School of Design and at the helm of his New York-based practice,
sure" of "our collective inheritance" as we begin to design the Field Operations — is making real in a number of high-profile projpost-industrial
city, to take the past with us as we move into the ects. This spring, the first major built example of his new agenda will
future. Pushing aside landscape architecture's back-seat, anti-urban debut: the High Line, an abandoned New York City railroad viaduct
tendencies, Corner makes a firm case for a much more ambitious remade into a grand, public promenade. As a cross between New
82 GARDEN DESIGN APRIL 09