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groundbreaker
York's industrial past and a revolutionary
synthesis of landscape architecture,
ecology, art and urbanism, the High Line
will amount to nothing less than a garden
in the sky.
While Le Corbusier found inspiration
in the American grain elevator, Corner
finds his in the vast inventory of large
abandoned sites, including old factories,
closed landfills, deserted ports and
waterfronts, former airfields, and forgotten
neighborhoods. Although the
challenges of transforming these places
are enormous — so far about 1 mile of
the High Line's concrete bed has had to
be removed so repairs and waterproofing
could be done to the structure — Corner's
post-industrial aesthetic is based on the
reality that big urban projects require
infusions of billions of dollars over ю
or 15 years. In his eyes, this leads to the
necessity of a flexible methodology able
to go with the punches as things change
and projects evolve over time. Unlike
architects, who tend to think in terms of
designed objects, landscape architects,
like gardeners, capitalize on change to
successfully grow and can therefore take
on a complex range of issues and bring
a lot to projects. He isn't interested in
imposing a static image on a garden,
park or cityscape. Instead he wants to
grow them "to engineer a site as a selfsustaining
ecosystem."
Corner's approach will become clear
enough to the millions who will soon start
walking the High Line on Manhattan's
West Side. A tight, linear, on-the-average
30-foot-wide, 1.5-mile-long promenade,
it features a primary walking path only
8 feet in width. Unlike the Promenade
Plantee in Paris — a much-heralded, earlier
example of a viaduct translated into
an urban park — the High Line makes
no effort to repeat a traditional conversation
between planting beds, pergolas
and such. Instead, choreographed by
Field Operations in collaboration with
the Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf, the
High Line will become home to a grassland
matrix inspired by what had grown
up through the cracks after the High Line
closed to traffic in 1980. And while the
Promenade Plantee masks Paris behind
thickets of foliage, the skinny footprint
of the High Line flaunts an ever-changing
view of the back side of the city. In a
sundeck area of the park, chaises open
views of the Hudson River provide a place
to stop and rest. A tunnellike passage will
double as an exhibition gallery. There's even
room at the park for small performances to
take place. The combination creates a feeling
that one is enmeshed in a landscape
while simultaneously being part of the city
surrounding it.
If the High Line is New York's mostinnovative
park since Central Park, Corner's
program for transforming the Fresh Kills
landfill on Staten Island into a huge recreational
park is widely considered one
of the most-forward-looking public-works
projects in the global arena. When completed
in 2031, it will also stand as the
incarnation of what Corner calls "landscape
urbanism" — a term that has become the
battle cry for avant-garde landscape architects
everywhere. Corner explains it "as a
way of viewing the urban fabric as if it is
a landscape. It's not just the green stuff in
between — it's what happens when you
think of it as everything."
And there is a lot of everything at Fresh
Kills. At 2,200 acres and 3.4 square miles
— almost three times the size of Central
Park — it was formerly one of the largest
landfills in the world. Then as now, Fresh
Kills, which derived its name from the
Middle Dutch word kille, or riverbed, is part
of one of the largest tidal wetland ecosystems
in the region. Even after it was transformed
into a landfill in 1948,55 percent of its area
remained populated with creeks, wetlands
and dry lowlands.
The problems associated with the bereft
site are common to landfills in general: lowfertility
soil; lack of ecological diversity;
leachate (a kind of "garbage juice," which
must be extracted from the trash mounds
and sent through a system of pipes and
pumps to a cleansing plant); the complex
infrastructure of the mounds that can't be
altered; and the release and management
of methane gases. It takes some 30 years to
ensure a safe and clean environment. While
some firms that entered the City of New
York's International Design Competition
in 2001 were stumped by the challenges,
Corner fingered them as a means of releasing
the site's extraordinary potential.
In his "Lifescape" proposal. Corner
made no apologies for the trash mounds.
In fact, he looked at them as all-important
dramatic features in the landscape and an
essential aspect of the history of the site.
To date, three of the six mounds have been